The New Unconscious

Ran R. Hassin James S. Uleman John A. Bargh, Editors

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The New Unconscious

Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience Series Editor Ran R. Hassin Editorial Board Mahzarin Banaji, John A. Bargh, John Gabrieli, David Hamilton, Elizabeth Phelps, Yaacov Trope The New Unconscious Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh

Copyright 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The new unconscious / edited by Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh. p. cm (Oxford series in social cognition and social neuroscience) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-514995-5 1. Subconsciousness. I. Hassin, Ran R. II. Uleman, James S. III. Bargh, John A. IV. Series. BF315 .N47 2004 154.2dc22 2003021368

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents

Contributors ix Introduction: Becoming Aware of the New Unconscious 3 James S. Uleman

PART I Fundamental Questions

1. Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 19 Daniel M. Wegner 2. Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior 37 John A. Bargh

PART II Basic Mechanisms

3. The Interaction of Emotion and Cognition: The Relation Between the Human Amygdala and Cognitive Awareness 61 Elizabeth A. Phelps 4. The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential Applications 77 Ap Dijksterhuis, Henk Aarts, and Pamela K. Smith 5. Nonintentional Similarity Processing 107 Arthur B. Markman and Dedre Gentnerv

The New Unconscious

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Introduction: Becoming Aware of the New Unconscious

James S. Uleman

Over the past decade or two, a new picture of unconscious processes has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. Unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were, not so long ago, thought of as requiring mental resources and conscious processes. These range from complex information processing through behavior to goal pursuit and self-regulation. Much has changed since Kihlstroms (1987) description of the cognitive unconscious. This collection of chapters provides a sampling of some of the most important developments at the heart of this new picture.

The ContextThe ancient unconscious in Western thought might be traced as far back as the fth century BCE in Greece, if we dene the unconscious as internal qualities of mind that affect conscious thought and behavior, without being conscious themselves. Hippocrates proposed (and Galen elaborated on) four basic temperamentssanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmaticthat are based on bodily humors and shape behavior in conjunction with rational (conscious) thought. This same division into unconscious, biologically based inuences and conscious, mental inuences is echoed in Kants thought over two millennia later. He distinguished temperament from moral character, with only the latter enabling people to consciously control themselves and be morally accountable to others. The details of the unconscious mind changed as metaphors for the mind changed over these two millennia, but it was almost always present. Platos innate ideas are present at birth (and his ideal forms are eternal), but3

experience and education are required to make them available to any individual. Aristotle viewed the mind as part of the soul, with the properties of each dependent on the bodys condition. His view of people as basically rational, curious, and social left plenty of room for experience to shape habits and dispositions that operated without conscious awareness. In the fourth and fth centuries CE, Augustine elaborated the concepts of free will, conscience, and individual responsibility to control urges and impulses that arise from our lesser natures. At the beginning of the Renaissance, Descartes developed a psychology based on the inuence of an immaterial will and eternal soul on the reexes and animal spirits that controlled the body. This famous dualism was reinforced by his conviction that what animated the hydraulically operated moving gures in the French Royal Gardens could not be the same substance that animated people. But the nature of this substance and how it moved the body was obscure, even mysterious, and thus not even open to naturalistic study. In some sense, Descartess unconscious was spiritual. Whatever frameworks have been used, thoughtful observers of human behavior have almost always found it necessary to distinguish between internal inuences that are hidden and must be inferred (fate, temperament, soul, character) and those they believe are transparent, experienced directly, or open to introspection (see Robinson, 1995). Assumptions about the relative importance of conscious and unconscious inuences have varied greatly with the times, and even within the same era. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, while Wundt and Titchener were building a psychology of what is conscious by training participants in introspection, Freud was building a psychology of what is unconscious. Many of Freuds ideas had already been expressed artistically in the literature and drama of the nineteenth century, and he regarded Dostoyevsky as the greatest psychologist of that century. Freuds great contribution was to gather, elaborate, systemize, and rene these ideas, in an attempt to build a scientic approach to unconscious processes. In doing so, he put the unconscious on the intellectual and cultural map, and gave the term itself currency. The psychoanalytic unconscious is, to most laypeople and those in the arts and humanities, the only unconscious. It has many more characteristics (besides operating outside of awareness) than can be reviewed here. It includes the id (the innate and inherently antisocial sexual and aggressive drives that blindly seek expression and satisfaction) and most of the superego (the conscience and ego ideals) and ego (processes that deal with reality, such as perception and motor control, and defense mechanisms that mediate conicts between reality, id, and superego). The primary metaphor is a hydraulic system with various uids (drives, energy) seeking discharge (pleasure) and being channeled or blocked by defenses and sublimations. It is extremely complex because it includes many interacting processes that are not4 Introduction

easily isolated from each other, and that both conict with and accommodate each other. The conicts are dramatic and the stakes are high, but the outcomes of these struggles are quite unpredictable. Thus the psychoanalytic unconscious is widely acknowledged to be a failure as a scientic theory because evidence of its major components cannot be observed, measured precisely, or manipulated easily. The theorys complexity renders it largely unfalsiable. The unfalsiability of the theory as a whole has not prevented investigators from adapting its ideas to make them more empirically tractable (e.g., chapter 16, this volume; Pennebaker, 1990) or nding support for aspects of the theory in contemporary research (e.g., Erdelyi, 1985). But it does not provide an inuential framework for understanding unconscious processes in academic or scientic circles (see Westen, 1998, for a dissenting view). The behavioral unconscious may sound like an oxymoron because behaviorism treated conscious experience as epiphenomena, saw the mind as a dangerous ction, and said nothing explicitly about unconscious processes. Nevertheless, the organisms history of reinforcement and other behaviorally relevant experiences is stored within, and might be called the behavioral unconscious. That history is the key to predicting behavior. Behaviorism avoided the problems of introspections unreliability and psychoanalysiss complexity and empirical intractability by avoiding analyses of internal processes altogether and treating the mind in some ways as a black box. Behavior and its consequences (e.g., reinforcements) served to make stimulus-response connections inside the box, in much the way that telephone operators made connections on a manual switchboard. The high-water mark of behaviorisms attempt to account for complex behavior is probably Skinners (1957) book Verbal Behavior. Chomskys (1959) incisive critique made the limitations of behaviorism clear to most, and it is no longer regarded as adequate for explaining most complex human behavior. The cognitive unconscious was rst described by Kihlstrom (1987), and the title of this volume pays homage to his inuential essay. In it, he describes the ways in which the computer as metaphor formed the basis for increasingly complex conceptions of human mental processes. In early models, the unconscious referred to preattentive perceptual processes and latent memory traces, so that complex higher mental processes depended on awareness for their operation. Unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, it has no innate drives that seek gratication without regard to constraints of reality and society. In fact it is rather cold, apparently rational, and amotivational, compared to the heat and irrationality of psychoanalytic drives and conicts. In later models, complex processing did not require awareness of the information that was transformed, so much more complex unconscious cognitive processing occurs. To illustrate all this, Kihlstrom reviewed research on automatic processes, subliminal perception, implicit memory, and hypnosis. He concludedIntroduction 5

that conscious awareness . . . is not necessary for complex psychological functioning (p. 1450). That is, the cognitive revolution in psychology and the development of cognitive science across disciplines (including anthropology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy) had discovered a great deal about complex unconscious mental phenomena and provided rigorous methods for studying them.

The ContentsSo what is new about the new unconscious? It is still basically cognitive, rmly embedded in cognitive science and historically beholden to the computer as a metaphor. The computer metaphor legitimized complex theories about unobservable processes while apparently avoiding the sins of anthropomorphizing and using homunculi as causes. But as Glaser and Kihlstrom note in chapter 7, the new unconscious is much more concerned with affect, motivation, and even control and metacognition than was the old cognitive unconscious. Goals, motives, and self-regulation are prominent, without the conict and drama of the psychoanalytic unconscious. And the new unconscious includes the causes of the phenomenal experience of having intentions and free will, of attributing these to oneself and others. It thus assumes and includes the determinants of free will (see chapter 1 and chapters 9 through 11 on theory of mind). In fact, the list of psychological processes carried out in the new unconscious is so extensive that it raises two questions: What, if anything, cannot be done without awareness? What is consciousness for? (see chapter 2). The other new thing is the multitude of methods used to study this plethora of processes. The chapters in this volume only sample that range, from neuroscience to cognitive and social lab experiments to naturalistic developmental observations (on theory of mind) to eld experiments (on self-regulation). Although this book describes its fair share of reaction time studies (including my own), no set of methods is supreme, and converging operations are preferred. As editors, we solicited chapters from many of the best researchers in this eld. Four of them turned us down because of other commitments. We did not ask others whom we might have asked, because we wanted to limit the books size. So these chapters provide a representative rather than exhaustive sampling of cutting-edge research and theory on the new unconscious.

Fundamental QuestionsAn important class of unconscious processes is those that are automatic. Automatic processes contrast with controlled processes, which typically require6 Introduction

attention and awareness. Wegner (chapter 1) raises a basic question that is implicit in decades of research on controlled processes, but seldom confronted: Who controls the controlled processes? He reviews the reasons why homunculi have no place in scientic theories and makes it clear that the question of control is unscientic if it presupposes an autonomous who. Then he turns to an easier question: Why does it feel as though were doing things? His answer rests on three principles: (1) the priority principle, that intentions precede actions; (2) a principle that intentions and actions are consistent with each other; and (3) the exclusivity principle, that there exist no other obvious causes of action besides intentions. He describes several ingenious studies that support these ideas by demonstrating conditions that create an illusion of free will, that is, an illusion that intentions control actions. He then moves on to argue that the very conditions associated with controlled processes are the conditions described by these principles. That is, the characteristics of what we call controlled processes are just the conditions that promote inferences that our will or intentions cause behavior. Our sense of agency is an inference, not incorrigible direct evidence that intentions cause actions. The mounting evidence that the new unconscious can account for so many complex, higher mental processes raises the fundamental question of what consciousness is for. Is it an epiphenomenon, as the behaviorists would have it? Does it have a function? Bargh (chapter 2) reviews evidence from several areas of psychology, all demonstrating that people can perform complex, exible, goal-oriented behavior nonconsciously. Neuropsychology studies of patients with frontal lobe damage show this in one way, and priming research from social psychology with normal college students shows it in another. Wegners research (chapter 1) shows how much the feeling of intentional control can be illusory. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that separate pathways are involved in controlling goal-directed behavior and knowing about it. The relevance of recent views of working memory as at least partially unconscious (see chapter 8), evidence from hypnosis, and developmental research on the acquisition of behavioral concepts is also described. What is consciousness for, if so much complex behavior can occur nonconsciously? Bargh proposes that one function of consciousness is to exibly select behaviors that can be performed automatically, so they then can occur without conscious attention.

Basic MechanismsClassifying mental processes as unconscious involves fundamentally psychologicalindeed phenomenologicalcriteria. Yet understanding how they function requires many levels of analysis. The tools and ndings of neuroscience have much to contribute to this effort, as Phelps (chapter 3) illustrates.Introduction 7

It would be impossible to summarize the contributions of neuroscience to our understanding of the new unconscious in a single chapter, given the explosive growth and rapid developments in this eld. Instead, Phelps illustrates the kinds of complex interactions that are likely to exist in many domains, by focusing on the role of the amygdala in the experience and consequences of fearinteractions among unconditioned fear stimuli, conscious expectations, memory systems, perception, and physiological fear responses. This work helps explain why, for example, long-term memory for emotional experiences is generally better than for neutral experiences, and how the preconscious perceptual analysis of emotional stimuli regulates attention and conscious emotional experience. As chapter 3 makes clear, (social) psychologists and (social) neuroscientists may gain a lot by exchanging ideas, methodologies, and data. We communicate more than we used to, but much less than we should. I do hope that future books in the series that this book initiates, the Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience, will help bring (social) cognition and (social) neuroscience closer together. Subliminal perception was one of the areas Kihlstrom (1987) cited in support of his cognitive unconscious. Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and Smith (chapter 4) present an updated and critical review of research on subliminal perception and subliminal persuasion. Given the widespread knowledge and strong opinions about these phenomena, they nd surprisingly little solid research on these topics. After discussing why so many people (both laypeople and scientists) have such strong opinions, they examine the evidence. They nd substantial research demonstrating that subliminal stimuli can change attitudes, consumer behavior, and health-related behaviorunder the right conditions. Just what those conditions are, or might be, is an important focus of their chapter and of their recommendations for future research. Similarity detection is fundamental and ubiquitous, has many consequences, and usually occurs unconsciously. Markman and Gentner (chapter 5) describe three models of what similarity may mean, focusing on their structure-mapping model as the best account of decades of research. They show how it accounts for the role of similarity in allocating attention among objects and features, how similar patterns in events and objects are detected, how repeated comparisons can change the bases of comparison, and how these processes operate in infants and children. Unintentional similarity detection also shapes adults choices between items, as in economic decision making; unconscious selection of metaphors in analogical reasoning; choices of comparison others that then shape the outcome of social comparison processes; and retrieval of signicant others whose similarity to strangers affects our impressions of them (chapter 16). Conscious thoughts are not limited to what occurred, but often include what might have been. Roese, Sanna, and Galinsky (chapter 6) examine counterfactual thinkingthe thoughts about what might have been that put8 Introduction

actual events into a larger perspective. While people sometimes generate counterfactuals intentionally, more often they spring to mind unbidden. The authors two-stage model describes both what activates counterfactual thinking (primarily negative affect) and what determines its content. Chapter 6 goes on to describe the ways in which goals and counterfactuals are intimately related to each other. With performance goals, counterfactual mental simulations can aid planning and improve performance. Their precise form (e.g., additive vs. subtractive) is affected by whether a persons dominant regulatory focus is promotion (gain oriented) or prevention (loss oriented; see chapter 18), and this affects analyses of causality. Affect goals (e.g., mood repair, mood maintenance, and self-protection) affect both the automaticity and content of counterfactuals. In addition, entertaining counterfactuals creates a mind-set in which people are more likely to consider alternatives. Other determinants and consequences of counterfactuals are discussed. Glaser and Kihlstrom (chapter 7) note how complex the cognitive unconscious has become since Kihlstrom (1987) rst used that term. Then it was conceived of largely in terms of cognitive processes. Since then, affect, motives, and goal-directed behavior have been added to our conception of what unconscious processes are possible. Glaser and Kihlstrom add to this list, arguing that unconscious processes possess multiple levels of awareness and that unconscious metacognition is possible. In support of these ideas, they describe their work on reverse priming, in which automatic correction for automatic evaluation seems to occur. Contrary to the usual ndings on automatic evaluation, participants in their priming studies show the fastest reactions when primes are extreme in valence and prime and target are of opposite valence. This suggests the operation of unconscious monitoring and overcorrection of unconsciously anticipated biases. Research from other labs shows similar results, as does evidence from research on automatically controlling stereotypes. Working memory is traditionally thought of as the mental blackboard or workspace where exible, conscious planning and control of action take place. Early conceptions of working memory were relatively undifferentiated, but recent conceptions paint a more complex picture. Hassin (chapter 8) modies this picture even further, making the case that working memory can operate unconsciously, exibly controlling cognitions and behavior without conscious awareness. He supports his argument with evidence from a series of studies that provide direct evidence of the operation of implicit working memory. In addition, he reviews other research on nonconscious goal pursuit to buttress his case (see chapter 2). This gives rise to the apparently oxymoronic idea of nonconscious control. If control is nonconscious, in what sense can it be control? Hassin distinguishes two meanings of control that are usually confounded, thereby resolving this apparent paradox. This allows him to suggest a new trichotomy for controlled processes.Introduction 9

Intention and Theory of Mind

If free will is an illusion, as Wegner (2002) suggests, what produces it and what functions might it serve? Why do we have such a powerful feeling that we, and other people, are doing things intentionally? Wegner (chapter 1) identies a set of conditions for this illusion. But other important questions remain. Do other species have this illusion? Do all people have it? How does it develop? One set of answers (and controversies) is suggested by research on theory of mind (ToM). Peoples theory of (their own and others) mind includes conceptions of free will and intentions, as well as desires, beliefs, and a host of other mental states and processes. It provides a basic theoretical framework within which person perception, communication, and social interaction take place. Yet like the rules of the language we speak, it seems to operate largely outside of awareness and be opaque to introspection. Malle (chapter 9) gives a broad introduction to ToM, describing the ways it functions as an unconscious conceptual framework that enables and is presupposed by a host of other conscious and unconscious processes. In this sense, it provides the conceptual foundation of social cognition. Like syntax, it includes classications and relationships among (mental) elements that we use unconsciously and that most people cannot make explicit. Its importance is most apparent when it is absent (as in autism) or not fully developed (as among children). He argues that one of the most important ways it classies behavior is into the intentional and the unintentional. This distinction, along with the distinction between observable and unobservable (e.g., mental) events, allows him to predict differences in patterns of attention and kinds of explanation shown by actors and by observers. He describes four kinds of explanations that adults give for their own and others behaviors, based on a fully developed but implicit ToM: causes, reasons, causal history of reasons, and enabling factors. Then he outlines the cognitive, motivational, and social conditions that govern the use of these kinds of explanations. The concept of intentions and the difference between intentional and unintentional behavior is central to adults ToM (as Malle notes in chapter 9). Baird and Astington (chapter 10) focus on the concept of intentionits place in adults ToM; how it differs from the concepts of desire and action; and how it develops in infants and toddlers. Of course, the conceptual foundations of childrens early understanding of intention are implicit, inferred by observers from childrens actions and reactions in natural play and laboratory situations. By the time children are 3 years old, their language includes explicit reference to intentional states. But this early explicit conception of intention is not well differentiated from the concept of desire. Baird and Astington (chapter 10) describe the ways that language development and communicative interactions each contribute to the differentiation of desire from inten-

10 Introduction

tion, so that by 5 years of age, childrens conception of intention approaches that of adults. Language development seems to be critical to these changes. Peoples remarkable ability to anticipate others behavior is based in large part on their ability to accurately infer their states of mind. Most people have the capacity to develop a ToM that they can use to understand others. Lillard and Skibbe (chapter 11) tackle the fundamental question of where this capacity comes from. Some have argued that it is based on innate concepts, represented in a mental module that evolutionary pressures selected for because it confers signicant advantages in a species as social as ours. Lillard and Skibbe pose two challenges to a strong modularity view of ToM, with its assumption of encapsulated cognitive processes. The rst is the great cultural diversity in how people conceive of others mental life and the causes of their behavior. The second is evidence that spontaneous explanations of behavior and spontaneous trait inferences (see chapter 14)both products of the automatic operation of ToMvary with cultural and social class background. They argue that there is little room for this kind of variation in a strongly modular view of ToM and discuss how these two opposing views of the origins of ToM might be reconciled.

Perceiving and Engaging Others

Not all research on perceiving others makes reference to theory of mind. In fact, it is remarkably absent from most research on person perception, and is not even mentioned in the latest authoritative handbook chapter on the topic (Gilbert, 1998). Such integrations await future development (but see chapter 11; Malle & Hodges, in press). However, there is already a rich and exciting frontier of research on unconscious process involved in perceiving others, which is sampled next. A remarkable amount of information is communicated to others nonverbally, without either party being aware of expressing (encoding) or interpreting (decoding) it. Choi, Gray, and Ambady (chapter 12) summarize the growing body of research on the unintended communication of personal characteristics such as emotions, beliefs and expectations, information about social relations, and personality traits. What kinds of information get communicated in this way? How accurate are the impressions based on these processes? How automatic are these processes, and how much could be controlled? What functions might these processes serve? Choi et al. describe the methods that they and others have used to study these questions and outline the remarkable answers that this research suggests. Chartrand, Maddux, and Lakin (chapter 13) summarize what is known about nonconscious mimicry of others behaviors. Mimicry of others speech,

Introduction 11

facial expressions, other behavior, and even emotion and mood has long been noted. What is new is the mounting evidence that mimicry often occurs not only without awareness, but also without cognitive mediation. That is, there is now good evidence of a direct perception-behavior link, which these authors describe. What adaptive functions might mimicry serve, in our species evolution and in our current social life? What facilitates and what inhibits nonconscious mimicry? Can conscious goals promote nonconscious mimicry? These are the kinds of questions to which Chartrand et al. seek answers, based on the latest research from their own and others laboratories. Uleman, Blader, and Todorov (chapter 14) describe a program of research on implicit impressionsunconscious impressions of others based on longforgotten episodes. People may not be able to verbalize implicit impressions or even realize they have them, but implicit impressions nevertheless affect explicit impressions and behaviors toward others. Andersens research on social cognitive transference (see chapter 16) shows the power of preexisting implicit impressions. Uleman et al. show that new implicit impressions can be created in the laboratory, and that they have automatic, unconscious effects on the subsequent formation of explicit impressions. They describe a new application of Jacobys process dissociation procedure (PDP; see chapter 15) which shows that both implicit and explicit memory of others affects subsequent explicit impressions. This work provides new perspectives on the sources of errors and biases and ways of reducing them in our perceptions of others. Payne, Jacoby, and Lambert (chapter 15) develop the idea that implicit attitudes, including stereotypes, consist of biases in category accessibility. Thus they produce errors in how we respond to people and objects, but only when conditions preclude the use of objective information that would produce accurate responses. In this accessibility view of stereotypes and attitudes, stereotyped perceptions occur when controlled processes fail, not when stereotype inhibition fails. Implicit attitudes contrast not with explicit attitudes, but with the ability to respond in a manner consistent with ones goal, that is, with having cognitive control in situations where accurate perception is possible. They make a strong case for using the PDP to estimate effects of both implicit attitudes and controlled processes within the same task, because performance on many tasks is determined both by automatic (implicit) and controlled processes. Their accessibility model ts their PDP data better than an inhibition model, suggesting that more stereotyping under conditions that lower controlsuch as making speeded decisions like those of the police ofcers in the Amadou Diallo case, or forming impressions of others in publicis due directly to the failure of controlled processes, rather than to failing to inhibit or correct the inuence of stereotypes. Andersen, Reznik, and Glassman (chapter 16) summarize an extensive research program that documents how representations of signicant others12 Introduction

unconsciously inuence our responses to strangers. In this research, participants describe signicant others (SOs) in one session. Then later, in an ostensibly unrelated session, they encounter a stranger who has some of the features of one of their SOs. Results show that this partial resemblance automatically activates the SO representation, which affects impressions of and emotional reactions to the stranger, all without the participants awareness. In addition, representations of the self that are associated with the SO also become activated, including in some cases self-regulatory processes that were developed in interaction with threatening SOs. These demonstrations all suggest that the self is fundamentally interpersonal and relational, providing all people with a repertoire of relational selves grounded in the web of their important interpersonal relationships. And these relational selves can and usually do operate outside of awareness.

Self-RegulationSelf-regulation would seem to be one of the last bastions of conscious selfdetermination and autonomous agency. But both its failures and successes provide many demonstrations of the operation of the new unconscious. Research reviewed here shows successful strategies for turning goals into unconscious procedures that operate almost automatically when appropriate conditions arise. It shows how unconscious chronic orientations affect decision making and the evaluation of outcomes. And it suggests other arenas of self-regulation where unconscious processes may be shown to operate in future research. How might consciousness function to make relatively novel, intentional behaviors occur more automatically (as Bargh suggests it does in chapter 2)? Gollwitzer, Bayer, and McCulloch (chapter 17) outline a theory of implementation intentions that provides at least one answer. Implementation intentions are situation-specic plans of the form, If I encounter X, I will do Y. Forming such plans effectively turns over control of behavior initiation to the environment, making the appropriate performance of the behavior later much more likely, and making it less dependent on consciously monitoring situations and renewing behavior intentions. Gollwitzer et al. review remarkable evidence which shows that simply forming implementation intentions makes detection of goal-relevant situations more likely, and initiation of goalrelevant behavior more rapid in those situations, for as long as the goal is important. A great variety of both wanted and unwanted behavior can thus be controlled more effectively. And self-regulation through implementation intentions seems to have few of the drawbacks associated with more arduous therapies.Introduction 13

Higgins (chapter 18) describes two motivational orientations (usually unconscious), how they affect a remarkable variety of decision processes outside of awareness, and how they affect the evaluation of outcomes. The promotion regulatory focus involves emphasizing positive outcomes (both gaining them and avoiding their absence) and is characterized by eagerness in goal pursuit. The prevention focus emphasizes negative outcomes (avoiding them and seeking their absence) and is characterized by vigilance in goal pursuit. Strategies emphasizing eagerness and vigilance each have their advantages and disadvantages. Decision makers are typically unaware of the unintended trade-offs they produce. They affect not only hits and false alarm rates (in signal detection terms), but also creativity, counterfactual thinking (see chapter 6), and how expectancies and values interact. They also lead to value transfer, in which outcomes arrived at through strategies that match the decision makers orientation (promotion or prevention) are valued more highly. Higgins provocatively questions whether or not these unconscious motivational effects are irrational, and what rationality might mean in various contexts. Trope and Fishbach (chapter 19) pose the question of what self-regulatory strategies people use to protect their long-term goals from being thwarted by short-term temptations. They outline and describe empirical support for a theory that addresses this question, counteractive control theory. Counteractive self-control occurs when people do something, usually consciously, to counteract the effects of temptations to act in ways they would rather avoid. Strategies include imposing penalties for acting badly (e.g., eating fattening foods), giving oneself a bonus for acting well, or reevaluating outcomes. The evidence supports a model in which temptations detract from long-term goal attainment directly but indirectly promote it by instigating counteractive control processes. Counteractive control is goal dependent and almost invariably proportional to the strength of short-term temptations. Current evidence indicates that some (or perhaps all) of the processes of counteractive control can be made automatic.

The CodaOur view of the new unconscious is partial, developing, seen through a glass darkly. But like some of the other views of human nature reviewed at the beginning, it may have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves and change our social institutions, once it is more fully articulated. Some of its features challenge common sense and suggest ways that either common sense will have to be revised, or explicitly and intentionally part company with scientic theory. Folk theories and scientic theories often diverge. But when the object of the theory is our own nature, the stakes are14 Introduction

higher. It is not yet clear, for example, whether the new unconscious must challenge our fundamental notions of free will and social responsibility, of merit and blame, and of the self and religious beliefs. Perhaps the drama it seems to lack at the moment, compared to the psychoanalytic unconscious, will be found in how it impacts our culture and institutions in the future. But thats a different book and set of concerns. Until then, there is plenty of research to do. ReferencesChomsky, N. (1959). A review of Skinners Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 2658. Erdelyi, M. H. (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freuds cognitive psychology. New York: W. H. Freeman. Gilbert, D. T. (1998). Ordinary personology. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 89150). New York: McGraw Hill. Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237, 14451452. Malle, B. F., & Hodges, S. D. (Eds.). (in press). Other minds. New York: Guilford. Pennebaker, J. W. (1990). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. New York: Guilford. Robinson, D. N. (1995). An intellectual history of psychology (3rd ed.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Westen, D. (1998). The scientic legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 333 371.

Introduction 15

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PART I

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

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1Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes?Daniel M. Wegner

We are the robots, We are the robots. Were functioning automatic, And we are dancing mechanic. The Robots, Kraftwerk (1978)

Are we the robots? This question surfaces often in current psychological research, as various kinds of robot partsautomatic actions, mental mechanisms, even neural circuitskeep appearing in our explanations of human behavior. Automatic processes seem responsible for a wide range of the things we do, a fact that may leave us feeling, if not fully robotic, at least a bit nonhuman. The complement of the automatic process in contemporary psychology, of course, is the controlled process (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Bargh, 1984; Posner & Snyder, 1975; Shiffrin & Schnieder, 1977), and it is in theories of controlled processes that vestiges of our humanity reappear. Controlled processes are viewed as conscious, effortful, and intentional, and as drawing on more sources of information than automatic processes. With this power of conscious will, controlled processes seem to bring the civilized quality back to psychological explanation that automatic processes leave out. Yet by reintroducing this touch of humanity, the notion of a controlled process also brings us within glimpsing range of a fatal theoretical errorthe idea that there is a controller. This chapter begins by examining why the notion of a controller is a problem. As we shall see, theories of controlled processes often imply that the19

person (or some other inner agent such as consciousness or the will or the self) is a legitimate possible cause of the persons observed thought or behavior. This supposition undermines the possibility of a scientic theory of psychology by creating an explanatory entity that cannot itself be explained. The task, then, is to examine how controlled processes might work if they are not the acts of such an agent. What happens if indeed there is no controller? The chapters conclusion, if you prefer reading from back to front, is this: The operation of controlled mental processes is part of the mental mechanism that gives rise to a sense of conscious will and the agent self in the person. Controlled processes do not start with a controllerin other words, they result in one.

The Homunculus Problem

In the lm Manhattan, Woody Allen searches at one point for the right word to describe his romantic rival. He nally ends up calling him this little . . . homunculus. He is referring to the rivals stature, in the sense that a homunculus is a little person, a dwarf or manikin. In the sciences of the mind, however, the term is pejorative in quite a different sense. It stands for an absurd explanationan inner executive agent who does the persons actions. Freuds theory of id, ego, and superego, for instance, has often been criticized as a homunculus-based explanatory system in which the persons behavior is explained by reference to an inner agent (in this case, a committee of them) that is responsible for the persons actions. Whenever we explain a behavior by saying that some personlike agent inside the person simply caused it, we have imagined a homunculus and have thereby committed a classic error of psychological explanation. The issue here, of course, is that a homunculus must itself be explained. The path of explanation implied by the homunculus idea is to reapply the same trick and suggest that another smaller homunculus might be lurking inside the rst. This path leads to the specter of an innite regress of homunculi, nested like Russian dolls, that quickly descends into absurdity. Another way to explain a homunculus is simply to say that it has free will and can determine its own behavior. This means the homunculus causes things merely by deciding, without any prior causes leading to these decisions, and thus renders it an explanatory entity of the rst order. Such an explanatory entity may explain lots of things, but nothing explains it. This is the same kind of explanation as saying that God has caused an event. A rst-order explanation is a stopper that trumps any other explanation, but that still may not explain anything at all in a predictive sense. Just as we cannot tell what God is going to do, we cannot predict what a free-willing homunculus is likely to do either. There cannot be a science of this.20 Fundamental Questions

Most psychologists and philosophers are well aware of the homunculus problem (e.g., Baars, 1997; Dennett, 1978), and it has been generally avoided in contemporary theorizing, with one noteworthy exception. The notions of controlled and automatic processes carry with them the implicit assumption of a kind of homunculus. Now it is true, of course, that most current cognitive and social cognitive research focuses specically on the automatic side of this dichotomy, so much so that there seems to be progressively less room for the little person in the head (e.g., Bargh, 1997; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; but see Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). But why should there be any room at all? The steady march of automaticity ndings is only interesting and understandable because it occurs in the context of its complement, the controlled process. And the controller of controlled processes all too often resembles that inexplicable mini-me, the homunculus. The homunculus in controlled processing is usually implicit rather than explicit. No theorist has actually said and therefore, the little person in the head is responsible for the nonautomatic processes we have observed. Baumeister (2000, p. 25) has come very close to this by saying the self is the controller of controlled processes, and it is not clear what this could mean other than that there is a homunculus to be found controlling things.1 However, this is a rare expression of what is usually an unspoken assumption, a background belief that controlled processes are somehow more personlike than automatic processes, representing the work of a human agent rather than that of some kind of mechanism. Controlled processes are often seen as conscious, moral, responsible, subtle, wise, reective, and willful, not because they are described as such in so many words, but rather because they are what is left when we subtract the automatic processes. Everyone knows, after all, that automatic processes may be unconscious, unintentional, primal, and simple-mindedas well as impulsive, selsh, and prejudiced to boot. The human and the robot inside each person have traditionally been characterized as two different personalities in the person. This was a popular line of theory in early psychology, exemplied by commentators such as Sidis (1898), who described what he called the subliminal self. This unconscious netherself carries out automatic behaviors (such as those suggested by hypnotists) and performs simple-minded actions. Contrasted with this, of course, is the conscious self, capable of all of the ne and intelligent thoughts and actions that any human or homunculus could desire. The subliminal self was robotic and in its simplicity did not need to be viewed as having a mind. In more contemporary discussions, the automatic or unconscious self continues to be appreciated as little smarter than a bar code reader (e.g., Greenwald, 1992), while the conscious self is still accorded full status as a human agent. These comparisons of automatic processes with the processes of the conscious self leave us marveling at the wonders of which the conscious self is capable. They do not, however, explain the conscious self.Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 21

Unfortunately, psychologys continued dependence on some version of a conscious self makes it suspect as a science. In the halls of science, controlled processes are haunted by the controller. They seem to have lower status as scientic explanations than automatic processes because there is a ghost in their machine. Automatic processes are seen as more scientically authentic, reecting the true nature of humans rather than their conscious and strategic affectations. So, we grimly but readily accept evidence indicating that automatic processes express racial prejudices (e.g., Banaji & Dasgupta, 1998; Devine, 1989) and render careless judgments (Gilbert, 1989). We accept as well that automatic processes prompt blind mimicry of others behaviors (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998), and we readily assent, too, that automatic processes are devilishly difcult to overcome (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994; Wegner, 1994). Automatic processes seem robotic and deeply causal. Controlled processes, for their part, seem less than genuine, reecting unpredictable human choices rather than scientically respectable causes. The temptation to imagine a controller seems to be fueled by our deep appreciation of the idea of mind. Early in life, we develop the tendency to understand events that are attributable to minds, and to distinguish them from events that are caused by mechanical processes. The studies of Heider and Simmel (1944), for example, highlighted our extraordinarily compelling inclination to perceive even cartoon geometrical gures as causal agents. The tendency for people to anthropomorphize physical objects and events is a further expression of this natural proclivity (e.g., Guthrie, 1993), and contemporary research on the development of theory of mind in animals and humans suggests that this faculty for mind perception is a strong guiding force in perception more generally (e.g., Carey, 1996). Our readiness to perceive minds behind events is enhanced further by the experiences we have of our own mindsparticularly, the experience of causal agency. We each have extensive experience with the sense that we control our actions, from nger wags to the grandest gestures, and these many instances add up to the convincing intuition that we are controllers who cause our actions. Regardless of whether this feeling that we are doing things is a valid indicator of control, it is this feeling that we tend to equate with the idea of control and that gives us the further intuition that there is always an agent behind the processes that control human thought and action. For controlled processes to reach their full scientic utility, though, they need to be understood apart from any notion of a controller. Controlled processes can indeed be understood as mechanistic processesfor example, as in the cybernetic and dynamical processes posited in control theories (e.g., Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Carver & Scheier, 1998; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; OReilly, Braver, & Cohen, 1999; Vallacher & Wegner, 1985; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). These approaches examine the nature of controlled processes22 Fundamental Questions

without positing a controller. This is the way it needs to be for progress in the explanation of human psychology. The agent self cannot be a real entity that causes actions, but only a virtual entity, an apparent mental causer. The controller, in this light, is a personal construction that blends into a scientic illusion. The sense we each have that we are agents who cause our actions is constructed and installed on an act-by-act basis each time we experience causing our action. This experience is available to us primarily during the operation of controlled processes. The personal experience of agency is not a good foundation for a science of mind, however, and we must be careful as scientists to appreciate the basis of this feeling rather than to incorporate the feeling in our theories. To free controlled processes of the controller, it is important to examine how it is that people come to see themselves as controllers. We need to explore the genesis of the experience of conscious will.

Apparent Mental Causation

Why does it feel as though we are doing things? The experience of consciously willing our actions seems to arise primarily when we believe our thoughts have caused our actions. This happens when we have thoughts that occur just before the actions, when these thoughts are consistent with the actions, and when other potential causes of the actions are not present. A theory of apparent mental causation (Wegner, 2002; Wegner & Wheatley, 1999) suggests that these principles of priority, consistency, and exclusivity govern the inferences people make about the causal inuence of their thoughts on their actions, and thus underlie the experience of doing things on purpose. In essence, the theory suggests that we experience ourselves as agents who cause our actions when our minds provide us with previews of the actions that turn out to be accurate when we observe the actions that ensue. Consider some examples to illustrate these principles. If you think of standing up and walking to the window, and then nd yourself doing this, the appearance of the thought in mind appropriately prior to the action would support your inference that your thought caused your action. Imagine, however, nding that you had walked to the window without any preview. Having the thought appear only after the action was complete would undermine your experience of will. For that matter, an experience of will would also be subverted if the thought appeared long before the action and then was lost to consciousness by the time you walked to the window. Again, it would not feel as if you had done it, and you might then wonder how you got there. The experience of involuntariness in hypnosis and in automatisms such as Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, and automatic writing can be traced toWho Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 23

anomalies of priority (Wegner, 2002). In each case, actions occur without thoughts of them occurring just beforehand, and as a result the actions are experienced as unwilled. The priority principle suggests that the thought must appear in a timely way just before the action for the action to be experienced as voluntary, so departures from this sequence lead to experiences of involuntariness. In a study of this principle, Wegner and Wheatley (1999) presented people with thoughts (e.g., a tape-recorded mention of the word swan) relevant to their action (moving an onscreen cursor to select a picture of a swan). The movement the participants performed was actually not their own, as they shared the computer mouse with an experimental confederate who gently forced the action without the participants knowledge. (In yet other trials, the effect of the thought on the participants own action was found to be nil when the action was not forced.) Nevertheless, when the relevant thought was provided either 1 or 5 seconds before the action, participants reported feeling that they acted intentionally in making the movement. This experience of will followed the priority principle. This was clear because on other trials, thoughts of the swan were prompted 30 seconds before the forced action or 1 second afterwardand these prompts did not yield an inated experience of will. Even when the thought of the action is wholly external appearing as in this case over headphonesits timely appearance before the action leads to an enhanced experience of apparent mental causation. The second key to apparent mental causation is the consistency principle, which describes the semantic connectedness of the thought and the action. Thoughts that are relevant to the action and consistent with it promote a greater experience of mental causation than thoughts that are not relevant or consistent. So, for example, having the thought of eating a salad (and only this thought) just before you nd yourself ordering a plate of fries is likely to make the ordering of the fries feel foreign and unwilled (Where did these come from?). Thinking of fries and then ordering fries, in contrast, will prompt an experience of will. As another example, consider what happens when people with schizophrenia experience hearing voices. Although there is good evidence that these voices are self-produced, the typical response to such auditory hallucinations is to report that the voice belongs to someone else. Hoffman (1986) has suggested that the inconsistency of the utterance with the persons prior thoughts leads to the inference that the utterance was not consciously willedand so to the delusion that others voices are speaking in ones head. Ordinarily, we know our actions in advance of their performance and experience the authorship of action because of the consistency of this preview with the action. In a laboratory test of the consistency principle, Wegner, Sparrow, and Winerman (2004) arranged for each of several undergraduate participants to observe their mirror reection as another person behind them, hidden from24 Fundamental Questions

view, extended arms forward on each side of them. The person behind the participant then followed instructions delivered over headphones for a series of hand movements. This circumstance reproduced a standard pantomime sometimes called Helping Hands in which the other persons hands look, at least in the mirror, as though they belong to the participant. This appearance did not lead participants to feel that they were controlling the hands if they only saw the hand movements. When participants could hear the instructions that the hand helper followed as the movements were occurring, though, they reported an enhanced feeling that they could control the others hands. In another experiment on hand control, this effect was again found. In addition, the experience of willing the others movements was found to be accompanied by an empathic sensation of the others hands. Participants for this second study watched as one of the hands snapped a rubber band on the wrist of the other, once before the sequence of hand movements and once again afterward. All participants showed a skin conductance response (SCR) to the rst snapa surge in hand sweating that lasted for several seconds after the snap. The participants who had heard previews of the hand movements consistent with the hands actions showed a sizeable SCR to the second rubber band snap as well. In contrast, those with no previews, or who heard previews that were inconsistent with the action, showed a reduced SCR to the snap that was made after the movements. The experience of controlling the hand movements seems to induce a sort of emotional ownership of the hands. Although SCR dissipated after the movements in participants who did not hear previews, it was sustained in the consistent preview condition. The consistency of thought with action, in sum, can create a sense that one is controlling someone elses hands and, furthermore, can yield a physiological entrainment that responds to apparent sensations in those hands. It makes sense in this light that consistency between thought and action might be a powerful source of the experience of conscious will we feel for our own actions as well. The third principle of apparent mental causation is exclusivity, the perception that the link between ones thought and action is free of other potential causes of the action. This principle explains why one feels little voluntariness for an action that was apparently caused by someone else. Perceptions of outside agency can undermine the experience of will in a variety of circumstances, but the most common case is obedience to the instructions given by another. Milgram (1974) suggested in this regard that the experience of obedience introduces agentic shifta feeling that agency has been transferred away from oneself. More exotic instances of this effect occur in trance channeling, spirit possession, and glossolalia or speaking in tongues, when an imagined agent (such as a spirit, entity, or even the Holy Spirit) is understood to be inuencing ones actions, and so produces a decrement in the experience of conscious will (Wegner, 2002).Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 25

A further example of the operation of exclusivity is the phenomenon of facilitated communication (FC), which was introduced as a manual technique for helping autistic and other communication-impaired individuals to communicate without speaking. A facilitator would hold the clients nger above a letter board or keyboard, ostensibly to brace and support the clients pointing or key-pressing movements, but not to produce them. Clients who had never spoken in their lives were sometimes found to produce lengthy typed expressions this way, at a level of detail and grammatical precision that was miraculous. Studies of FC soon discovered, however, that when separate questions were addressed (over headphones) to the facilitator and the client, those heard only by the facilitator were the ones being answered. Facilitators commonly expressed no sense at all that they were producing the communications, and instead they attributed the messages to their clients. Their strong belief that FC would work, along with the conviction that the client was indeed a competent agent whose communications merely needed to be facilitated, led to a breakdown in their experience of conscious will for their own actions (Twachtman-Cullen, 1997; Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003). Without a perception that ones own thought is the exclusive cause of ones action, it is possible to lose authorship entirely and attribute it even to an unlikely outside agent. Another example of the exclusivity principle at work is provided in studies of the subliminal priming of agents (Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, & Aarts, 2004). Participants in these experiments were asked to react to letter strings on a computer screen by judging them to be words or notand to do this as quickly as possible in a race with the computer. On each trial in this lexical decision task, the screen showing the letters went blank either when the person pressed the response button, or automatically at a short interval (about 400650 ms) after the presentation. This made it unclear whether the person had answered correctly and turned off the display or whether the computer did it, and on each trial the person was asked to guess who did it. In addition, however, and without participants prior knowledge, the word I or me or some other word was very briey presented on each trial. This presentation lasted only 17 ms, and was both preceded and followed by random letter maskssuch that participants reported no awareness of these presentations. The subliminal presentations inuenced judgments of authorship. On trials with the subliminal priming of a rst-person singular pronoun, participants more often judged that they had beaten the computer. They were inuenced by the unconscious priming of self to attribute an ambiguous action to their own will. In a related study, participants were subliminally primed on some trials with the thought of an agent that was not the selfGod. Among those participants who professed a personal belief in God, this prime reduced the causal attribution of the action to self. Apparently, the decision of whether

26 Fundamental Questions

self is the cause of an action is heavily inuenced by the unconscious accessibility of self versus nonself agents. This suggests that the exclusivity of conscious thought as a cause of action can be inuenced even by the unconscious accessibility of possible agents outside the self. The theory of apparent mental causation, in sum, rests on the notion that our experience of conscious will is normally a construction. When the right timing, content, and context link our thought and our action, this construction yields a feeling of authorship of the action. It seems that we did it. However, this feeling is an inference we draw from the juxtaposition of our thought and action, not a direct perception of causal agency. Thus, the feeling can be wrong. Although the experience of will can become the basis of our guilt and our pride, and can signal to us whether we feel responsible for action in the moral sense as well, it is merely an estimate of the causal inuence of our thoughts on our actions, not a direct readout of such inuence. Apparent mental causation nevertheless is the basis of our feeling that we are controllers.

From Controlled Processes to an Agent

The feeling of conscious will that occurs with any given action is likely to be inuenced by the psychological process responsible for that action. If the process allows access to information indicating that thoughts occurred with appropriate levels of priority, consistency, and exclusivity, the action will be experienced as willed, whereas in other cases it will not. So, for instance, psychological processes that create snoring when we are asleep might yield a particularly impoverished array of information and/or computational ability regarding willand so fail to create an experience that we are snoring on purpose. The information in this case fails to establish conscious will because, in sleep, we do not even have conscious thoughts that can be assessed for their relative priority, consistency, and exclusivity, nor are we likely to be doing much computation. This observation suggests that variability in the experience of conscious will may be attributable to variations in the availability of the essential sources of information for the computation of apparent mental causation, as well as the availability of mental resources. Such availability could ow from the very processes creating action. Certain processes, then, allow the experience of will, while others do not. In particular, the operation of will may be inferred to the degree that there are available (1) conscious thoughts, (2) observable actions, and (3) time and attention to infer a causal link between them. In each of these respectsconscious thinking, action monitoring, and attention deploymentcontrolled processes are more likely to support an in-

Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 27

ference of conscious will than are automatic processes. This line of reasoning suggests how it is that controlled processes can create the experience of a controller.2 Consider rst the role of conscious thinking. If a person has no conscious thoughts prior to an action, apparent mental causation cannot be inferred. The idea that controlled processes are conscious maps onto this criterion directly. Indeed, it is difcult to imagine a controlled process that ensues without some kind of conscious preview, so much so that it is common to nd the term conscious substituting for controlled and compared with automatic in the research literature (e.g., Bargh, 1994; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). If controlled processes involve conscious thought, while automatic processes need not do so, then it is primarily through controlled processes that a controller might be inferred. The same reasoning applies when we consider the intentionality of the controlled process. In emphasizing that controlled processes are intentional, Bargh (1994) and most other commentators allow that the intention may cause the action (and by this suggestion, they breathe a bit of life into the controller). Bargh and Ferguson (2000) and Wegner and Bargh (1998) have recognized this problem and have suggested that concepts of control and intention need to be dened without reference to a controlling agent. The apparent mental causation perspective that follows from this view suggests that the intention is important not as a cause, but because it is a conscious preview of the action that is often consistent with the action that is subsequently observed. The intent that precedes or accompanies a controlled process thus serves as a basis for an experience of will and enables the inference of a controller. The second feature of controlled processes that allows us to infer an agent is the fact that they involve action monitoring. Automatic processes, of course, are generally understood as unmonitored or even ballisticprocesses that once started cannot be stopped or even guided. The outputs of automatic processes may thus never be known to the person. Controlled processes, in contrast, typically involve a feedback loop, a comparison between what was intended and what actually happened. This comparison requires that the person know at some level, sometimes consciously, what action has indeed occurred. And it is this conscious monitoring of the completed action that is necessary for the inference of apparent mental causation. One can only feel will for actions one knows one has performed. This means that many of the automatic actions observed in psychological laboratories cannot give rise to any inference of mental causation. Unless participants in a study specically know that they are walking more slowly, for example (see Bargh et al., 1996), they will not be able to infer that they consciously willed doing this. When automatic processes do happen to announce their resulting actions and thoughts to consciousness, they may then be eligible to give rise to a sense of agency. But controlled processes do this every time.28 Fundamental Questions

The third feature of controlled processes that supports the inference of agency is the degree of attention deployment they allow. Controlled processes are typically marked by slowness and thoroughness, as the attention devoted to them makes them both resource draining and methodical. Consider their slowness rst. Time to think is particularly useful when causal inferences need to be made regarding ones own thought and action, and automatic processes are not likely to provide this time. Automatic processes can yield results, often in milliseconds, whereas controlled processes may take days and at a minimum seem to require several hundred milliseconds. Responding to a green light by punching the accelerator, for instance, can occur almost before we are conscious that the light is green. In a study in which participants were tracking by hand an unexpectedly moving target, for example, the change in their hand trajectory toward the targets movement happened as early as 100 ms following the target jump. However, the vocal signal by which they reported their consciousness of the jump (in this case, saying Pah) did not occur on average until more than 300 ms later (Castiello, Paulignan, & Jeannerod, 1991). The sheer speed of automatic processes leaves inferences of agency in the dust. The thoroughness of controlled processes is related to their use of attention deployment as well. A conscious half hour meandering through all the possible responses one might make to an insult, for example, is likely to produce a far more thorough, studied, and balanced response than is a quick, automatic retort. The thoroughness of controlled processes allows them to review and integrate a far wider range of information on the way to their output than is the case for automatic processes. It makes sense, then, that the reasoning involved in examining priority, consistency, and exclusivity for an action is more likely to be developed through controlled processes than through automatic processes. Because automatic actions do not support inferences of agency during the action, it turns out that many of our most uid, expert, and admirable actions are ones we do not experience consciously willing. Should we write a particularly beautiful piece of prose, there is often a distinct sense that it happened to us rather than that we did it. Scientists and mathematicians similarly claim that their creative discoveries seemed just to pop into their heads (e.g., Koestler, 1989). This loss of the sense of authorship in skilled action occurs widely in sports as well, such that calling a player unconscious turns out to be a major compliment. Admittedly, most people are quite willing to take credit for skilled actions after the fact, as few writers, scientists, or sports stars turn down their paychecks. But the intriguing aspect of automatic actions is that they do not feel willed as they unfold. Because appropriate previews do not seem to come to mind to allow the inference of conscious will, the authors of skilled actions often report feeling like spectators who happen to have particularly good seats to view the action.Who Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 29

Feelings of conscious will are most likely, in this view, for actions that we traditionally understand as involving willpower. When our thoughts about an action appear very prominently before the action occurssuch as when we ponder in depth our plan to resist that drink or smoke or extra mufn we then experience an unusual surge of the feeling of will. The exercise of self-control creates an apt circumstance for this feeling because it specically involves an intense preview period just before the action (of resistance). When we succumb to some automatic or habitual indulgence, in contrast, we seldom think much about it, and so we experience little sense of willing the indulgent act. Automatic indulgences tend to occur when we have thought of the action long in advance of its occurrence (such as when we premeditate dropping by the bar on the way home just in case some friends are drinking), or when we think of the action as it occurs (such as when were putting the drink to our lips). The optimal time for thought that contributes to feelings of will is a few moments before the action, and this is when our thoughts of moderation, when effective, can yield great waves of will and resultant selfcongratulation. These observations suggest that we feel conscious will as we perform our actions primarily in the case of actions that are caused by controlled processes. These processes allow us the conscious thoughts, self-observed actions, and time and attention necessary to draw causal inferences about how our minds seem to be involved in producing our behaviors. In drawing these inferences, we accumulate the picture of a virtual agent, a mind that is apparently guiding the action. Although this mind is a deeply important construction, allowing us to understand, organize, and remember the variety of things we nd ourselves doing, it is a construction nonetheless and must be understood as an experience of agency derived from the perception of thoughts and actionsnot as a direct perception of an agent.

Virtual AgencyThe creation of our sense of agency is critically important for a variety of personal and social processes, even if this perceived agent is not a cause of action. The experience of conscious will is fundamentally important because it provides a marker of our authorshipwhat might be called an authorship emotion. In the words of T. H. Huxley (1910, p. 218), Volition . . . is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. Each surge of will we sense in the operation of controlled processes provides a bodily reminder of what we think we have done. In this sense, the function of will is to identify our actions with a feeling, allowing us to sense in a very basic way what we are likely to have done, and to distinguish such things from those caused by events in the world or by other people or agents. Like30 Fundamental Questions

the somatic marker function of emotion (Damasio, 1994), the experience of conscious will anchors our actions to us in a way that transcends rational thought. Conscious will is a cognitive feeling, like confusion or the feeling of knowing (see Clore, 1992). Although it does not have an associated facial expression, it shares with the basic emotions an experiential componentwe do not just deduce that we did an action, we feel that we did it. We resonate with what we do, whereas we only notice what otherwise happens or what others have doneso we can keep track of our own contributions, remembering them and organizing them into a coherent picture of our own identity as agents. By this reasoning, conscious will can be understood as part of an intuitive accounting system that allows us to deserve things. We must know what we have done if we are going to claim that our actions have earned us anything (or have prevented us from deserving something nasty). Our sense of what we have achieved, and our ideas, too, of what we are responsible for in moral domains, may arise because we gain a deep apprehension of our likely causal role in the experience of will. The creation of personal action authorship must thus be attributable to controlled processes. This means that automatic processes regularly fail to create an agent self, the sense that there is an I who did the action. Automatic processes seem to emanate from an unperceived center, a seemingly robotic source that does not experience its own likely complicity in action causation. Automatic processes can occur and leave us like zombies, often not knowing our actions in advance or afterward, and also without the mental resources to compute our complicity. Automatic processes leave us in the dark that we are authors at all. In promoting an experience of will, in turn, controlled processes allow us to experience the subjective causation of the controlled action, and so open the door to the experience of personal emotions such as pride and disappointment in achievement domains, not to mention moral emotions such as guilt and elevation in moral domains (cf. Uleman, 1989). Because controlled processes give rise to the sense of authorship, they open up the possibility that thoughts of authorship can inuence subsequent action. Controlled processes leave a residue of memories of past authorship, and give rise as well to anticipations of future authorship. It is in this sense that many theorists have spoken of the self as a kind of narrator, creating a life story (e.g., Dennett, 1992). Controlled processes can take authorship issues into account because authorship has been created by other controlled processes in the past and can be anticipated to arise from controlled processes in the future. The experiences of authorship that enter into action this way are not direct perceptions of an agent, it should be remembered, but rather are estimates of the role of ones own thoughts in action that are produced by the system that infers apparent mental causation. Far from a simple hoWho Is the Controller of Controlled Processes? 31

munculus that does things, then, the self can be understood as a system that arises from the experience of authorship, and is developed over time by a set of controlled processes that manage memories and anticipations of authorship experiences. We become agents by experiencing what we do, and this experience then informs the processes that determine what we will do next. Yes, this line of thinking does seem a bit cumbersome when we compare it to the naive simplicity of homunculus talk. To be accurate, we must speak of apparent mental causation, or of virtual agency, rather than of intention or of a controller. But the labor we expend to keep the controller out of our theorizing may well repay us with new insights into phenomena that were impenetrable given only the notion that there is a little person in the head. Profound mysteries in the psychology of self and identity might become a bit less mysterious. We might begin to appreciate, for example, how there could ever be multiple little people (as in multiple personality disorder) or how there could be replacement little people (as in spirit possession or channeling) or even how each persons own sense of the little person inside (as in the development of the agent self) might become open to more effective explanation. On the fringes of our current understanding lie many phenomena that have not been tractable because the assumption of a real controller makes them seem quite out of the question. These phenomena do seem to exist, and our further thinking about the nature of control, automaticity, and the self can be informed by them. All we need to do is assume, for sake of argument, that we are the robots.

Real Mental Causation

In focusing on the topic of apparent mental causation, this chapter has tiptoed quietly around the big sleeping problem of real mental causation. Questions of whether thought actually does cause action, for example, have been left in peace, and the issue of the role of consciousness in the causation of action has been ignored as well. This is because the focus of this theory is the experience of conscious will, not the operation of the will. According to this theory, the experience of will is based on interpreting ones thought as causing ones action. The experience of will comes and goes in accord with principles governing that interpretive mechanism, then, and not in accord with any actual causal link between thought and action. This theory is mute on whether thought does cause action. Most theories of behavior causation have gotten this all confused. Questions of how thought or consciousness might cause action have been muddled together with questions of the persons experience of such causation,

32 Fundamental Questions

and in this snarl nothing seems particularly clear. In large part, this seems to have happened because the feeling of free will is so deeply powerful and impressive. All too often, we take as gospel truth our personal intuition that our conscious thoughts cause our actions (See, Im moving my nger!), and we assume that this experience is a direct pipeline to the truth of the matter. But imagine for a minute that we are robots. Imagine that our actions arise from a complicated set of mechanisms. Imagine, too, that these excellent mechanisms also give rise to thoughts about what we will do that preview our actions quite reliably. In other words, all the trappings are present to allow us to experience apparent mental causation. If we were robots, would our reports of willed actions (e.g., I raised my nger) be understood as infallible indicators of the actual causal sequence underlying our actions? If someone had installed a will-interpretation mechanism that used our thoughts of actions and our actions to infer our authorship (e.g., Thought of nger raising occurred 800 ms before nger went up), would the output of that mechanism be considered a direct readout of how the action had been produced? Far from it. The robot analysis team down at the factory would take this output as one piece of evidence, but would want to have tests and sensors and gauges in every sprocket to discern whether this potential causal path was indeed the right one. In this sense, reports of apparent mental causation from humans and robots alike should be taken as estimates of the underlying mechanism at bestand certainly not as readouts of the causal mechanism underlying actions. The way the mind seems to its owner is the owners best guess at its method of operation, not a revealed truth. Notes1. The self in Baumeisters theory is more a repository of prior causal inuences than it is a homunculus or uncaused cause. So I am probably picking on him unfairly in singling out this statement. Still, such talk of a controller certainly prompts images of a little person. 2. A note on denition is helpful here. Attempts to dene automatic and controlled processes have pointed to several features that seem to distinguish them. Bargh (1994) suggested that the processes tend to differ in their susceptibility to consciousness, ability to be intended, efciency, and susceptibility to inhibition. Automatic processes do not usually have all of these featuresthey are not simultaneously unconscious, unintended, efcient, and unstoppableand instead seem to be dened as having at least one of the features. Controlled processes, on the other hand, regularly do seem to share all the complementary featuresthey are conscious, intended, inefcient, and stoppable. Wegner and Bargh (1998) suggested this asymmetry reveals that controlled processes are the dening end of this dimension, from which automatic processes are noted for their departure.

2Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social BehaviorJohn A. Bargh

Paris, 1986: Doctor Lhermitte accompanies two patients of his to various locations around the city. Both of them had suffered a stroke, which had damaged portions of their prefrontal cortex, areas critical for the planning and control of action. First, in his ofce, the woman gives Dr. Lhermitte a physical exam using the available equipment and utensils. Later, after they spend a half hour in the professors apartment, he escorts the two of them out to the balcony, casually mentions the word museum, and leads them back inside. Their behavior becomes suddenly different: they scrutinize with great interest the paintings and posters on the wall, as well as the common objects on the tables, as if each was an actual work of art. Next, the man enters the bedroom, sees the bed, undresses, and gets into it. Soon he is asleep. Across these and several other situations, neither patient is able to notice or remark on anything unusual or strange about their behavior. New York, 1996: University students take part in an experiment on the effects of behavior-concept priming. As part of an ostensible language test, participants are presented with many words. For some participants, words synonymous with rudeness are included in this test; for others, words synonymous with politeness are included instead. After nishing this language test, all participants are sent down the hall, where they encounter a staged situation in which it is possible to act either rudely or politely. Although participants show no awareness of the possible inuence of the language test, their subsequent behavior in the staged situation is a function of the type of words presented in that test. People are often unaware of the reasons and causes of their own behavior. In fact, recent experimental evidence points to a deep and fundamental disso37

ciation between conscious awareness and the mental processes responsible for ones behavior; many of the wellsprings of behavior appear to be opaque to conscious access. That research has proceeded somewhat independently in social psychology (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Wilson, 2002), cognitive psychology (e.g., Knuf, Aschersleber, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1997), and neuropsychology (e.g., Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000; Jeannerod, 1999), but all three lines of research have reached the same general conclusions despite the quite different methodologies and guiding theoretical perspectives employed. This consensus has emerged in part because of the remarkable resemblance between the behavior of patients with some forms of frontal lobe damage and (normal) participants in contemporary priming studies in social psychology. In both cases, the individuals behavior is being controlled by external stimuli, not by his or her own consciously accessible intentions or acts of will. Both sets of evidence demonstrate that action tendencies can be activated and triggered independently and in the absence of the individuals conscious choice or awareness of those causal triggers. In the examples that opened this chapter, for Lhermittes (1986) patients as well as our undergraduate experimental participants (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), individuals were not aware of the actual causes of their behavior. In this chapter, I compare and contrast lines of research relevant to the nonconscious control of individual social behaviorthat is, behavior induced to occur by environmental factors and not by the individuals conscious awareness and intentions. Such factors include, but are not limited to, the presence, features, and behavior of another person or persons (such as interaction partners). These are the environmental triggers of the behavior, which then occurs without the necessity of the individual forming a conscious intention to behave that way, or even knowing, while acting, what the true purpose of the behavior is (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). My main purpose is to help demystify these phenomena by showing how several very different lines of research are all converging on the same conclusions regarding the degree of conscious access to the operation and control of ones own higher mental processes. Another purpose is to demystify the seeming power over psychological and behavioral processes wielded by some simple words namely those that are synonymous with behavioral and motivational concepts such as rude and achieve. These lines of relevant research come from social psychology as well as cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the study of hypnosis. Yet they converge on the same story: that, at best, we have imperfect conscious access to the basic brain/mind processes that help govern our own behavior, broadly dened (i.e., from the motoric to the social and motivational levels). This harmony between the growing evidence of nonconscious inuences on social behavior and higher mental processes (e.g.,38 Fundamental Questions

Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Wilson, 2002) on the one hand, and the neuropsychological evidence from both imaging and patient research concerning executive functioning, working memory, and the control of action on the other (e.g., Baddeley, 2001; Fourneret & Jeannerod, 1998; Frith et al., 2000), is reciprocally strengthening of the conclusions of both lines of research. Of course, there are key important differences between these two areas of research as well. For example, the fact that our undergraduate experimental participants could be induced by subtle priming manipulations to behave in one way or another does not mean they largely lack the ability to act autonomously, as Lhermittes patients did. The damage to those patients prefrontal cortices greatly reduced their ability to behave in any way except those afforded through external, perceptual means. Yet the priming and the patient studies do complement and support each other in demonstrating the same two principles: that an individuals behavior can be directly caused by the current environment, without the necessity of an act of conscious choice or will; and that this behavior can and will unfold without the person being aware of its external determinant.

Social Psychologys Magical Mystery Tour

Two streams of research in social psychology have converged on the idea that complex social behavior tendencies can be triggered and enacted nonconsciously. One line of research focuses on ideomotor action or the perception-behavior linkthe nding that mental content activated in the course of perceiving ones social environment automatically creates behavioral tendencies (Prinz, 1997). Thus, for example, one tends to mimic, without realizing it, the posture and physical gestures of ones interaction partners (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). This chameleon effect has been found to extend even to the automatic activation of abstract, schematic representations of people and groups (such as social stereotypes) in the course of social perception (see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). For example, subtly activating (priming) the professor stereotype in a prior context causes people to score higher on a knowledge quiz, and priming the elderly stereotype makes college students not only walk more slowly but have poorer incidental memory as well (both effects consistent with the content of that stereotype). Similarly, activating the African American stereotype (which includes the trait of hostility) through subliminal presentation of faces of young Black men causes young White participants to react with greater hostility to a request by the experimenter. Thus, the passive activation of behavior (trait) concepts through priming manipulations increases the persons tendency to behave in line with that concept, as long as such behavior is possible in the subsequent situation. ItBypassing the Will 39

is the tendency or predisposition to behave in a certain way that is created, but the situation must be appropriate or applicable (Higgins, 1996) for that behavior to be performed. The second stream of research has shown that social and interpersonal goals can also be activated through external means (as in priming manipulations), with the individual then pursuing that goal in the subsequent situation without consciously choosing or intending to do so or even being aware even of the purpose of his or her behavior (Bargh, 1990; Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001). Again, all that is needed is for words or pictures closely related in meaning to the goal concept to be presented in an offhand and unobtrusive manner so that the person is not and does not become aware of the potential inuence or effect those goal-related stimuli might have on his or her behavior (Bargh, 1992). For example, even though subliminally presented primes related to cooperation did cause participants to cooperate on a task more than did the nonprimed control group, participants subsequent ratings of how much they had wanted and tried to cooperate during the task were uncorrelated with their actual degree of cooperative behavior. Yet the same items administered to participants who had been explicitly (i.e., consciously) instructed to cooperate did signicantly correlate with their actual degree of cooperation (Bargh et al., 2001, Experiment 2). Alternatively, words related to achievement and high performance might be embedded along with other, goal-irrelevant words in a puzzle, or words related to cooperation might be presented subliminally in the course of an ostensible reaction time task. Just as with single types of behavior such as politeness or intelligence, presenting goal-related stimuli in this fashion causes the goal to become active and then operate to guide behavior toward that goal over an extended period of time. People primed with achievementrelated stimuli perform at higher levels on subsequent tasks than do control groups; those primed with cooperation-related stimuli cooperate more in a commons-dilemma game; and those primed with evaluation-related stimuli form impressions of other people while those in a control group do not (see review in Chartrand & Bargh, 2002). Such effects are unlikely to be restricted to the laboratory environment; for example, merely thinking about the signicant other people in our lives (something we all do quite often) causes the goals we pursue when with them to become active and to then guide our behavior without our choosing or knowing it, even when those individuals are not physically present (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003). And the nonconscious ideomotor effect of perception on action becomes a matter of widespread social importance when applied to the mass exposure of people to violent behavior on television or in movies (see Hurley, 2002).

40 Fundamental Questions

For many years now, social psychologists have been busily documenting all of the complex, higher mental processes that are capable of occurring nonconsciously. Yet we still know little of how these effects occur, how they develop, and why so much in the way of complex, higher mental processes should take place outside of conscious awareness and control. Without some consideration of these issues, automatic behavior, judgment, and goal pursuit will continue to seem somewhat magical and mysterious to many people.1 Two aspects of these phenomena seem particularly magical. One is the profound dissociation between these varied psychological and behavioral responses to ones environment, on the one hand, and ones intentions and awareness of them on the other. People are behaving, interacting, and pursuing goals, all apparently without meaning to or knowing they are doing so. How is this possible? The second mysterious feature of these effects is that the same verbal or pictorial stimuli produce all of them. All it takes, it seems, is to activate the relevant concept in some mannerachievement or rudeness or cooperation or slowness, and so onthen, its activation and effect immediately spread and project to evaluations and approach-avoidance tendencies, to putting motivations and goals into play, and to creating traitlike behavior tendencies in the current situation. What accounts for this remarkable power of concepts?

Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Higher Mental Processes The Illusion of Conscious ControlOne reason why these effects seem magical is our fundamental belief in our own free will, which is derived in large part from our subjective experience of possessing it. We (on occasion) experience making a choice or forming an intention, and then enacting the decision or behavior, and take this as incontrovertible evidence that the intention caused the outcome. Whether or not it does, the subjective experience of will alone is insufcient, and even awed, evidence of the existence of free will. As Hume (1748) rst noted, we can observe antecedents, and we can observe consequences, but we cannot directly observe causal connections between events; that is, causation is always an inference and never something directly observable. Wegner (2002) has applied this principle to the subjective experience of free will, arguing that it is logically impossible for us to have introspective access to the causal connection between determining forces and inuences, and their behavioral consequences. More than that, he has furnished empiri-

Bypassing the Will 41

cal demonstrations that our experience of willing is rooted in a causal attribution process that can be experimentally manipulated to produce false experiences of will. Wegner and Wheatley (1999) reported studies in which participants used a computer mouse to move a cursor around a computer screen lled with pictures of objects, doing so along with another participant (actually a confederate of the experimenters) so that the two of them jointly determined the cursors location. While they were doing this, the names of the different objects were spoken to them one at a time over headphones. Unknown to the actual participant, the confederate was given instructions over his or her headphones from time to time to cause the screen cursor to point to a given object. By manipulating whether the name of the moved-to object had or had not been presented to the participant just (i.e., a second or two) before the cursor landed on it (as opposed to earlier, or after the cursor had landed on it), so that the thought about that object had been in the participants consciousness just prior to the cursors movement to it, the experimenters were able to manipulate the participants attributions of personal responsibility and control over the cursors movement. In these experiments, therefore, beliefs about personal agency could be induced by manipulations of the key factors presumed to underlie feelings of will, according to the authors attributional modeleven though those factors had not, in fact, been causal in the cursors movement. Such ndings demonstrate that people do not and cannot have direct access to acts of causal intention and choice. Kenneth Bowers (1984) had anticipated this nding when he pointed out that it is the purpose of psychological research to enhance our comprehension and understanding of causal inuences operating on thought and action. Notice, however, that such research would be totally redundant if the causal connections linking thought and behavior to its determinants were directly and automatically self-evident to introspection (p. 250). Within (especially social) psychology, a further reason for the widely held belief in a free, undetermined will is the contrast often made between automatic (nonconscious, implicit) and controlled (conscious, explicit) cognitive processes in the many dual-process models of social (and nonsocial) psychological phenomena (see Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Here, automatic processes are seen as determined, mechanistic, and externally (environmentally) triggered, while controlled processes are largely seen as their antithesis, leading to an implicit understanding of them as internally instigated and somehow undetermined and without mechanism. But it is another logical error to consider only automatic processes as caused and having underlying mechanisms, while controlled processes (somehow) do not, and are thus free (see Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Regardless, this implicit belief in the uncaused, almost metaphysical nature of conscious or controlled mental processes has existed42 Fundamental Questions

in psychology for some time. Indeed, it was the main reason for their rejection as psychological phenomena by behaviorism, an irony noted many years ago by Donald Campbell (1969):The stubborn certainty I nd in my experimental psychologist [behaviorist] friends on this point bespeaks not only a nave realism . . . but also a men talistic dualism. They tend to forget that thinking, decision making, or rational inference is carried out by brain tissue fully as much as are automatic reactions. They tend to think of them instead as purely mental. (pp. 6465)

Neuropsychological Mechanisms of Nonconscious Control

Thus far I have argued for the existence of sophisticated nonconscious monitoring and control systems that can guide behavior over extended periods of time in a changing environment, in pursuit of desired goals. Recent neuropsychological evidence, reviewed in this section, is consistent with these claims, as well as with the core proposition that conscious intention and behavioral (motor) systems are fundamentally dissociated in the brain. In other words, the evidence shows that much if not most of the workings of the motor systems that guide action are opaque to conscious access (see Prinz, 2003). This helps greatly to demystify the notion of nonconscious social behavior, because such a dissociation between motoric behavior and conscious awareness is now emerging as a basic structural feature of the human brain. The brain structure that has emerged as the primary locus of automatic, nonconsciously controlled motor programs is the cerebellum, and specically the neocerebellum (Thach, 1996). With frequent and consistent experience of the same behaviors in the same environmental context, this brain structure links the representations of those specic behavioral contexts with the relevant premotor, lower level movement generators. In this way, complex behavior can be mapped onto specic environmental features and contexts and so be guided automatically by informational input by the environment (i.e., bypassing the need for conscious control and guidance). Critically, cerebellar output extends even to the main planning area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, providing a plausible neurological basis for the operation of automatic, nonconscious action plans (e.g., Bargh & Gollwitzer, 1994). As Thach (1996) concludes from his review of research on the role and function of the cerebellum, [it] may be involved in combining these cellular elements, so that, through practice, an experiential context can automatically evoke an action plan (p. 428). Evidence from the study of brain evolution also points to an important role for the (neo)cerebellum in the deliberate acquisition of new skills (see Donald, 2001, pp. 191197). A major advance in human cognitive capacity andBypassing the Will 43

capability was the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the neocerebellum, which increased in size by a factor of ve. This expanded pathway enables nonconscious control over higher executive mental processes, because it connects the main cerebellar receiving areas in the brain stem with the frontal tertiary cortex (two levels of analysis removed from direct sensation). This part of the cortex receives inputs only from secondary analysis areas of the brain (which take input only from other mental representations and not from sensory organs), and thus is entirely buffered from direct sensory areas. The fact that these pathways are connected to high level cognitive regions places the cerebellum in a strategic location. . . . The overwhelming size of this connection to the prefrontal areas suggests an important executive role, probably in the generation of automated programs of executive control (Donald, 2001, pp. 196197). Hence, there appears to be a sound anatomical basis for the notion of nonconscious guidance of higher mental processes, such as interpersonal behavior and sophisticated goal pursuit.

Dissociations Between Mental Systems for Knowing versus Doing

Several lines of cognitive neuroscience research support the idea of a dissociation between conscious awareness and intention, on the one hand, and the operation of complex motor and goal representations on the other (Prinz, 2003). One major area of such research focuses on the distinct and separate visual input pathways devoted to perception versus action. Separate Visual Input Pathways The rst such evidence came from a study of patients with lesions in specic brain regions (Goodale, Milner, Jakobsen, & Carey, 1991). Those with lesions in the parietal lobe region could identify an object but not reach for it correctly based on its spatial orientation (such as a book in a horizontal versus vertical position), whereas those with lesions in the ventral-visual system could not recognize or identify the item but were nonetheless able to reach for it correctly when asked in a casual manner to take it from the experimenter. In other words, the latter group showed appropriate action toward an object in the absence of conscious awareness or knowledge of its presence. Decety and Grezes (1999) and Norman (2002) concluded from this and ` related evidence that two separate cortical visual pathways are activated during the perception of human movement: a dorsal one for action tendencies based on that information, and a ventral one used for understanding and recognition of it. The dorsal system operates mainly outside of conscious awareness, while the workings of the ventral system are normally accessible to consciousness. Jeannerod (2003) has similarly argued that there exist two different representations of the same object, one pragmatic and the other44 Fundamental Questions

semantic. The former are actional, used for interacting with the object; the latter are for knowing about and identifying the object. Thus the dorsal stream (or activated pragmatic representation) could drive behavior in response to environmental stimuli in the absence of conscious awareness or understanding of that external information. It could, in principle, support a nonconscious basis for action that is primed or driven by the current or recent behavioral informational input from othersin other words, be a neurological basis for the chameleon effect of nonconscious imitation of the behavior of ones interaction partners (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Moreover, the discovery of mirror neurons, rst in macaque monkeys (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998) and now in humans (Buccino et al., 2001)in which simply watching mouth, hand, and foot movements activates the same functionally specic regions of the premotor cortex as when performing those same movements oneselfis further compelling evidence for a direct connection between visual information and action control (see also Woody & Sadler, 1998). Taken together, these ndings implicate the parietal cortex as a potential candidate for the location of (social) priming effects. Recall that Goodale et al. (1991) had concluded from their patients that those with lesions in the parietal lobe region could identify an object but not reach for it correctly, but those with intact parietal lobes but lesions in the ventral-visual system could reach for it correctly even though they could not recognize or identify it. Lhermittes patients had intact parietal cortices that enabled them to act, but solely upon the behavioral suggestions afforded by the environmental situations or objects (i.e., primes). Lack of Conscious Access to Operating Behavior Procedures Related to this existence of a visual input pathway directly connected to the action system and relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness is that there is also minimal if any conscious access to any operating motor system (see review in Frith et al., 2000). This research is showing, to a startling degree, just how unaware we are of how we move and make movements in space. Again, this evidence is consistent with the proposition that our behavior can be outside of conscious guidance and control. A person cannot possibly think about and be consciously aware of all of the individual muscle actions in compound and sequential movementsthere are too many of them and they are too fast (see, e.g., Thach, 1996). Therefore they can occur only through some process that is automatic and subconscious. Empirical support for this conclusion comes from a study by Fourneret and Jeannerod (1998). Participants attempted to trace a line displayed on a computer monitor, but with their drawing hand hidden from them by a mirror. Thus they were not able to see how their hand actually moved in order to reproduce the drawing; they had to refer to a graphical representation ofBypassing the Will 45

that movement on a computer monitor in front of them. However, unknown to the participants, substantial bias had been programmed into the translation of their actual movement into that which was displayed on the screen, so that the displayed line did not actually move in the same direction as had their drawing hand. Despite this, all participants felt and reported great condence that their hand had indeed moved in the direction shown on the screen. This could only have occurred if normal participants have little or no direct conscious access to their actual hand movements.

Dissociations Between Intention and Action Within Working Memory

Under the original concept of working memory as a unitary short-term store, or that portion of long-term memory that was currently in conscious awareness (e.g., Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968), the idea of nonconscious operation of working memory structures was incoherent at best. If working memory was a single mental organ that held both the current goal and purpose, along with the relevant environmental information on which that goal was acting, then one should always be aware of the intention or goal that is currently residing in active, working memory. There cannot be dissociations within the operations of the same mental structure. Yet such dissociations do in fact exist between conscious intention and behavior, even complex social behavior as exhibited by Lhermittes patients, and it is these dissociations that are most relevant to understanding the mechanisms underlying nonconscious social behavior and goal pursuit. Such complex behavior, which is continually responsive to ongoing environmental events and coordinated with the behavior of others, has to involve the operation of the brain structures that support working memorynamely the frontal and prefrontal cortex. But if working memory contents are accessible to conscious awareness (cf. chapter 8, this volume), how can such dissociations exist? The answer to this apparent paradox, of course, is that working memory is not a single unitary structure. This idea was originally proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974; see also Baddeley, 1986), who envisaged a system comprising multiple components, not just for the temporary storage of information (the phonological loop and visuospatial scratchpad) but also for the direction and allocation of limited attention (the central executive). In a parallel development, psychiatrists working with patients with frontal lobe damagethe frontal lobes being brain structures underlying the executive control functions of working memory (Baddeley, 1986)were noting how the behavioral changes associated with frontal lobe damage were exceedingly complex and variable, depending on the exact locations of the damage (Mesu46 Fundamental Questions

lam, 1986, p. 320). This too was consistent with the notion that executive control was not a single resource but rather comprised of several distinct specialized functions, located in different parts of the frontal and prefrontal cortex. If so, then at least in theory it becomes possible that there are dissociations between consciously held intentions on the one hand and the goal-driven operation of working memory structures on the other. This is what is manifested in Lhermittes (1986) syndrome; as he called it, an excessive control of behavior by external stimuli at the expense of behavioral autonomy (p. 342). Postmortem analyses of his patients showed inferior prefrontal lesions in the same location of the brain. These had produced excessive behavioral dependency on the environment (which he termed environmental dependency syndrome or EDS)the imitation of others gestures and behaviors without control; also utilization of tools and props to behave in the way they suggested or afforded. Lhermitte concluded that EDS is a loss of autonomy: for the patient, the social and physical environments issue the order to use them, even though the patient himself or herself has neither the idea nor the intention to do so (p. 341). How exactly did damage to the inferior prefrontal regions of the brain result in this loss of autonomy, of ones behavior being so strongly controlled by the environment? This is a critical question for present purposes because, as noted at the outset of this chapter, there are striking similarities between the behavior of Lhermittes patients and that of primed normal college students in this regard. Lhermitte (1986) reasoned that EDS is due to the liberation of parietal lobe activity, which is no longer submitted to the inhibitory effect of the frontal lobe. . . . The frontal lobe systems that control the parietal sensorimotor systems have been known for a long time. The hypothesis that these systems link the individual to the environment is logical (p. 342). Subsequent research in cognitive neuroscience has largely supported Lhermittes deductions. Frith et al. (2000) concluded from their review of this research that intended movements are normally represented in the prefrontal and premotor cortex, but the representations actually used to guide action are in the parietal cortex. In other words, intentions and the motor representations used to guide behavior are apparently held in anatomically separate, distinct parts of the brain. This makes it possible for some patients to no longer be able to link their intentions to their actions if there is impairment in the location where intended movements are represented, but no impairment in the location where action systems actually operate. The nding that within working memory, representations of ones intentions (accessible to conscious awareness) are stored in a different location and structure from the representations used to guide action (not accessible) is of paramount importance to an understanding of the mechanisms underlying priming effects in social psychology. If intentions and corresponding actionBypassing the Will 47

plans were stored in the same location (or if there were conscious access to all of the operations of working memory; see chapter 8), so that awareness of ones intention was solely a matter of conscious access to the currently operative goal or behavior program, then it would be difcult to see how nonconscious control over social behavior could be possible. This nding alonea dissociation within working memory itself between conscious intention and actionhas the potential to remove much of the mystery behind the nonconscious activation and guidance of complex social behavior and goal pursuit. The storage of current intentions in brain locations that are anatomically separate from their associated and currently operating action programs would appear to be nothing less than the neural basis for nonconscious goal pursuit and other forms of unintended behavior.

Similarities of Priming and Hypnosis

The classic phenomenon demonstrating a dissociation between conscious will and behavior is hypnosis. Here too, the phenomenon has long been seen as magical and mysterious, and in fact was often featured in carnival and county fair magic shows, in which subjects were somehow induced to do bizarre and even superhuman acts. But hypnosis is also used today as an alternative to anesthesia, such that the patient feels no pain although undergoing a normally quite painful procedure. In reviewing the hypnosis literature up to that point, Sarbin and Coe (1972) remarked on how the many behaviors induced by hypnotic means violate our expectations of the normal limits of human behavior, which we normally think of as being under our own control:[This] aspect of the hypnotic situation creates surprise and puzzlement. How can we account for the apparent magnitude of response to such a benign stimulus? How can only a verbal request bring about so dramatic a change as analgesia to the surgeons scalpel? . . . The tendency is to interpret these exaggerated responses as being almost magical. (p. 17, italics in original)

The various modern theories of hypnosis, such as those of Hilgard (1986), Woody and Bowers (1994), and Kihlstrom (e.g., 1998) are dissociation theories of one sort or another; Hilgard and Kihlstrom propose that the person does not experience the control of his or her own behavior, while Woody and Bowers argued that hypnosis may alter not just the self-perception of the control of ones behavior but the actual nature of that control (dissociated control theory). In this theory, highly hypnotizable peoples subsystems of control may be relatively directly or automatically accessed, without be-

48 Fundamental Questions

ing governed by higher level executive control as much as they normally would. There are obvious parallels between hypnotic and priming phenomena, and the neuropsychological research reviewed above supports the notion of dissociated will or control in hypnosis as well as in priming effects. In both cases, the will is apparently controlled from outside, by external forces. However, there are also important differences between hypnosis and priming phenomena. For one thing, only 15% or so of people are so deeply hypnotizable that they will carry out posthypnotic suggestions in which their behavior is not guided by their own conscious intention (Kihlstrom, 1998), whereas research that has demonstrated the priming of goals or social behavior involved randomly selected (normal) participants. The reason for this difference may lie in the participants relative degrees of knowledge of the potential inuence of the hypnotic suggestion versus the prime: in the former situation, one is certainly aware of the intent of the hypnotist to make one behave in a certain way, but in the priming situation one is not. The latter thus enables a more passive inuence of the environment; it also allows a cleaner dissociation between awareness of what one is doing or trying to do, and ones actual actions. Nevertheless, given the obvious similarities between hypnosis and social priming phenomena, it would be interesting to explore further the potential common mechanisms underlying them. (For instance, do people who are more easily and deeply hypnotized also show stronger priming effects?)

Demystifying the Power of Concepts

One other magical issue needs to be addressed. How is it, in the goal and behavior priming research, that the same verbal or pictorial stimuli can produce such a variety of effects? In an automatic evaluation study (see Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; Duckworth, Bargh, Garcia, & Chaiken, 2002), the prime achieve, for example, immediately activates the concept good with spreading, unintended consequences for subsequent concept accessibility (see Ferguson & Bargh, 2002). The same word as a priming stimulus in an impression formation task causes the participant to view the target person as more achieving in nature. If the dependent variable is changed instead to a measure of the participants own behavior, he or she shows higher performance on that task and also manifests the classic qualities of motivational states such as persistence and returning to nish an uncompleted task (Bargh et al., 2001). How can the mere activation of the identical concept, through presenting synonyms of it in an unobtrusive, offhand manner, produce such strong effects on such a variety of psychological dependent

Bypassing the Will 49

measures? What is the nature of this power of activated concepts over our judgments and behavior?

The Acquisition of Behavioral Concepts in Young Children

To answer this question, we must turn to how concepts develop in young children in the rst place. According to the inuential research and theories of Vygotsky (1934/1962) and Luria (1961), learning a concept involves invoking it, linking it with the performance procedure and external information for which it stands. This is Vygotskys outside-inside principle: Symbolic thought rst represents external action, and only later becomes internal speech (i.e., thought; see Bruner, 1961; Donald, 2001, p. 250). Vygotsky argued that concepts and functions exist for the child rst in the social or interpersonal sphere and only later are internalized as intrapsychic concepts (see Wertsch, 1985, p. 64). Thus, according to this framework, the child learns behavioral concepts initially by having them paired by the caretaker with the observable, external features of those behaviors. In this way, the early learning of behavior concepts is linked to the perceptual features of that behavior, to what it means to behave in that certain way. The strong associations formed in early development between the perceptual features of a type of social behavior and the behavior concept itself is likely a major contributor to the spontaneous behavior-to-trait inference effect documented by Uleman and his colleagues (e.g., chapter 14, this volume). But social behavior and goal-priming research reverses this effect, by presenting synonyms of the concept under scrutiny and assessing whether the participant then behaves in that manner. Thus not only must concepts be learned by the young child in terms of their external observable features (That is a polite boy; That was a mean thing to say), but they also must be strongly associated with the behavioral procedures or action systems used to behave in that same way oneself. This was, in fact, another important part of the theory. According to Luria (1961, p. 17), it is through these behavior concepts that the parent or caretaker controls the very young childs behavior, naming objects and giving orders and instructions using behavior concepts. It is through the use of words that he or she steers the childs behavior. In this way, the behavior concept becomes stronglyand directlyassociated with the mental representation of how to behave that way. Note also that at this young age there is not a matter of choice or personal selection of the behavior. The child is not given an option; the behavior word is understood as an imperative and obligatory act to be performed. Luria (1961, p. 52) called this the impellant or initiating function of speech. Thus the linkage, in early learning, of the concept with the behavioral procedure50 Fundamental Questions

does not include an intervening choice point or act of willrather, the child is told what to do. It is only well after this imperative nature of word-tobehavior associations is established that the child later learns to formulate his or her own wishes and intentions. But the original, early learning of the behavior concept is as an imperative, choiceless relation. So in a very real sense, according to this developmental framework, the original and earliest learning of a behavioral concept is without free will or choice. This may help to explain how mere presentation of these concepts later in life, in hypnosis as well as in social behavior priming experiments, has such an imperative effect on the participants behavior.

Cognitive Neuroscience Evidence: The Verb-Behavior Link

As with the other proposed dissociations between intention and action, cognitive neuroscience research ndings are consistent with an automatic, nonconscious connection between behavioral concept representations and their corresponding motor representations. Perani et al. (1999) showed that merely hearing action verbs activates implicit motor representations, as well as working memory structures such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and premotor and parietal cortices, all of which are needed to carry out that behavior in an uncertain environment. Jeannerod (1999) showed that this link works in the other direction as well: observation of a meaningful action activated the same brain area (Brodman 45) as did the generation of action verbs or the retrieval of verbs from memory. Grezes ` and Decety (2001, p. 12) concluded from a review of the verb-motor program research that motor programs can be seen as part of the meaning of verbal items that represent action. Baddeley (2001) also highlighted the potential importance of verbal means of controlling action in an update of his model of working memory. In that model, the phonological loop is the working memory component corresponding to the temporary storage of verbal material (and thus may well be the component involved in verbal priming effects on behavior). Baddeley, Chincotta, and Adlam (2001) found that when the normal operation of the phonological loop in experimental participants is interfered with through articulatory suppression instructions, in which participants repeat out loud some task-irrelevant information in order to prevent or interfere with overt or covert rehearsal processes, working memory performance (such as the ability to switch between two tasks) suffered, as did performance on tests of executive functioning (such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting task). The authors concluded that their results offer strong evidence for the verbal control of action . . . [and] the neglected but important role of the verbal control of executive processes (pp. 655656).Bypassing the Will 51

Implications for the Purpose of Consciousness

There is a bafing problem about what consciousness is for. It is equally bafing, moreover, that the function of consciousness should remain so bafing. It seems extraordinary that despite the pervasiveness and familiarity of consciousness in our lives, we are uncertain in what way (if at all) it is actually indispensable to us. (Frankfurt, 1988, p. 162) What is consciousness for, if perfectly unconscious, indeed subjectless, information processing is in principle capable of achieving all the ends for which conscious minds were supposed to exist? (Dennett, 1981, p. 13)

I have argued here that conscious acts of will are not necessary determinants of social judgment and behavior; neither are conscious processes necessary for the selection of complex goals to pursue, or for the guidance of those goals to completion. Goals and motivations can be triggered by the environment, without conscious choice or intention, then operate and run to completion entirely nonconsciously, guiding complex behavior in interaction with a changing and unpredictable environment, and producing outcomes identical to those that occur when the person is aware of having that goal (see review in Chartrand & Bargh, 2002). But this is not to say that consciousness does not exist or is merely an epiphenomenon. It just means that if all of these things can be accomplished without conscious choice or guidance, then the purpose of consciousness (i.e., why it evolved) probably lies elsewhere. In an important (if indirect) way, then, research on nonconscious forms of social cognition, motivation, and behavior speaks to the question of what consciousness is for, by eliminating some of the more plausible and widely held candidates. If we are capable of doing something effectively through nonconscious means, that something would likely not be the primary function for which we evolved consciousness. For example, the fact that automatic goal pursuit involves monitoring the (perceived) environment and guidance or control over extended time periods of ones responses to it (e.g., Bargh et al., 2001) suggests that consciousness is not necessary for online monitoring and control, as is widely held by contemporary models of metacognition (e.g., Nelson, 1996; Paris, 2001). Of course, one can be meta-aware of ones perceptions, thoughts, and actions (monitoring) and also be aware of guiding those thoughts and actions toward a goal (control), but if this guidance can also occur without conscious awareness and intent, then these capabilities do not distinguish conscious from nonconscious processes. Thus online monitoring and control does not seem to be a viable candidate for the reason why we evolved consciousness. But there is a second potential function and benet of metacognitive awarenessof being aware at an abstract level, all at the same time, of what52 Fundamental Questions

is going on in the current environment, along with ones current thoughts, purposes, actions, and their effects. This higher level, abstract domain of awareness enables the coordination and integration of all the various mental states and activities to get them working together in the complex and sophisticated ways necessary to achieve complex and sophisticated ends (Armstrong, 1981, p. 65; see also Johnson & Reeder, 1997). Just as active attention is necessary for object recognition and perceptual binding (integration of features into a single percept), as many experts have argued (see Donald, 2001, p. 182), metacognitive consciousness is the workplace where one can assemble and combine the various components of complex perceptual-motor skills. This ability has given humans a tremendous advantage over other animals, because whereas most other species depend on their built-in demons to do their mental work for them, we can build our own demons (Donald, 2001, p. 8, italics in original). With remarkable prescience, Neisser (1963) had similarly speculated that the ability to develop and carry out many complex processes in parallel outside of the main line of conscious thought was the special advantage that human cognition had over that of other animals:It is worth noting that, anatomically, the human cerebrum appears to be the sort of diffuse system in which multiple processes would be at home. In this respect it differs from the nervous system of lower animals. Our hypothesis thus leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of humans and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it. (p. 10)

In a very real sense, then, the purpose of consciousnesswhy it evolved may be for the assemblage of complex nonconscious skills. In harmony with the general plasticity of human brain development, people have the capability of building ever more complex automatic demons that t their own idiosyncratic environment, needs, and purposes. As William James (1890) argued, consciousness drops out of those processes where it is no longer needed, freeing itself for where it is. A major reason why it is adaptive for consciousness to be deployed only when needed is its limited-capacity nature, as shown best by ndings of the dramatic ego-depleting consequences of even minimal conscious choice and regulatory processes (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998). Intriguingly, then, one of the primary objectives of conscious processing may be to eliminate the need for itself in the future by making learned skills as automatic as possible. It would be ironic indeed if, given the current juxtaposition of automatic and conscious mental processes in the eld of psychology, the evolved purpose of consciousness turns out to be the creation of ever more complex nonconscious processes.Bypassing the Will 53

ConclusionAction tendencies can be activated and put into motion without the need for the individuals conscious intervention; even complex social behavior can unfold without an act of will or awareness of its sources. Evidence from a wide variety of domains of psychological inquiry is consistent with this proposition. Behavioral evidence from patients with frontal lobe lesions, behavior and goal-priming studies in social psychology, the dissociated behavior of deeply hypnotized subjects, ndings from the study of human brain evolution, cognitive neuroscience studies of the structure and function of the frontal lobes as well as the separate actional and semantic visual pathways, cognitive psychological research on the components of working memory and on the degree of conscious access to motoric behaviorall of these converge on the conclusion that complex behavior and other higher mental processes can proceed independently of the conscious will. Indeed, the brain evolution and neuropsychological evidence suggests that the human brain is designed for such independence. These are tentative conclusions at this point, because cognitive neuroscience research is still in its infancy, and the cognitive psychological study of the underlying mechanisms of behavior and goal-priming effects in social psychology is perhaps in early childhood. But the two literatures clearly speak to each other. Indeed, Posner and DiGirolamo (2000) drew the more general and encompassing conclusion that the information-processing and the neurophysiological levels of analysis have achieved a level of mutual support greater than previously imagined. In opening their review, they remark on how closely linked the hardware of the brain is to the performance of cognitive and emotional tasks, and the importance of environment and self-regulation to the operations of the human brain (p. 874). The case of nonconscious social behavior reviewed in this chapter serves as an excellent example of that linkage: the neuropsychological evidence giving greater plausibility to the priming phenomena, and the priming phenomena demonstrating how deeply the neuropsychological phenomena affect the daily life of human beings.

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and by the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health (Grant MH60767). I am grateful to Alan Baddeley, Roy Baumeister, Jerome Bruner, Jean Decety, Peter Gollwitzer, Ran Hassin, Denis Phillips, Lee Ross, Jim Uleman, and Dan Wegner for feedback, comments, and suggestions; thanks also to Melissa Ferguson, Grainne Fitzsimons, Ravit Levy, K. C. McCulloch, Ezequiel Morsella, and Pamela Smith for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.54 Fundamental Questions

Note1. In fact, early on, Thorndike (1913, p. 105) did attack the ideomotor action principle as magical thinking, and his criticism effectively stied scientic research on ideomotor action for the next 60 years (see Knuf et al., 2001, p. 780).

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3The Interaction of Emotion and Cognition: The Relation Between the Human Amygdala and Cognitive AwarenessElizabeth A. Phelps

Over the last few decades, psychological theories on the relation between cognition and emotion have been shaped by evidence from neuroscience techniques. In particular, the debate of whether or not emotion occurs in the absence of cognitive awareness has been inuenced by studies of a subcortical brain structure, the amygdala, that is more or less specialized for emotional processing (Aggleton, 1992). In nonhuman animals, the amygdala has been shown to elicit learned emotional responses in the absence of cortical inputs (Romanski & LeDoux, 1992), which strongly suggests that cognitive awareness may not be a mediating factor. Although several psychological studies have provided evidence that emotion may operate independently of cognitive awareness (e.g., Zajonc, 1980), the convergence of support from neuroscience has added another layer to the debate about the relation between cognitive awareness and emotion. However, the neuroscience studies with nonhuman animals, while suggestive, do not directly address the relationship between emotion, the amygdala, and cognitive awareness. For obvious reasons, awareness cannot be easily assessed in species other than humans. In this chapter, I discuss what is known about the human amygdala and its relation to cognitive awareness and emotion. I begin by briey reviewing what has been learned about the amygdala from studies with nonhuman animals. I then outline how the human amygdala/emotion system can operate independently of cognitive awareness. Finally, I explore the ways in which the amygdala interacts with awareness, highlighting both the inuence of awareness on the amygdala and the role of the amygdala in modulating cognitive awareness.

61

The Amygdala: Insights From Research From Nonhuman Animals

The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure in the medial temporal lobes that sits adjacent to the hippocampus. Its potential role in emotional processing rst became apparent in studies with monkeys in which the medial temporal lobe was damaged (Kluver & Bucy, 1939). These monkeys were described as suffering from psychic blindness, also known as Kluver-Bucy syndrome. Monkeys with Kluver-Bucy syndrome displayed abnormal emotional responses, such as approaching and exploring stimuli they would normally avoid and fear (e.g., snakes). Although the description of Kluver-Bucy syndrome was important in emphasizing a role for the medial temporal lobe in emotional processing, it was not until 20 years later that Weiskrantz (1956) was able to show that it was damage to the amygdala specically that resulted in altered emotional behavior. More recent research with nonhuman animals has emphasized the amygdalas role in emotional learning and memory. Work by Davis (1992), Kapp, Pascoe, and Bixler (1984), and LeDoux (1992) has shown that while the amygdala is not critical to express an emotional reaction to stimuli that are inherently aversive, it is critical for learned fear responses. The primary paradigm used in these studies is fear conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus comes to acquire aversive properties by virtue of being paired with an aversive event. For instance, if a rat is presented a tone, it may show an orienting response at rst, but little else. However, if during the presentations of the tone the rat receives a footshock on a few occasions, when the tone is presented later the rat may freeze or show changes in heart rate, which are normal fear reactions for the rat. By being paired with the shock, the tone is no longer neutral. Instead, it represents a potential aversive consequence and elicits a conditioned fear response. These studies have shown the amygdala is critical for both the acquisition and expression of conditioned fear responses (LeDoux, 1996). Investigations into the neural systems of fear conditioning have mapped the pathways for learning from stimulus input to response output. One nding that has emerged from this research is that information about the identity of a stimulus can reach the amygdala by more than one pathway. Romanski and LeDoux (1992) have shown that there are separate cortical and subcortical pathways to convey perceptual information to the amygdala. If one pathway is damaged, the other is sufcient to signal the presence of a conditioned stimulus and elicit a conditioned response. It has been suggested that these dual pathways may be adaptive (LeDoux, 1996). The amygdala responds to stimuli in the environment that represent potential threat. The amygdala then sends signals to other brain regions and the autonomic nervous system, preparing the animal to respond quickly. The subcortical pathway to the62 Basic Mechanisms

amygdala can provide only a crude estimation of the perceptual details of the stimulus, but it is very fast. The cortical pathway allows the stimulus to be fully processed, but it is somewhat slower. This crude, fast subcortical pathway may prepare the animal to respond more quickly if, when the stimulus is fully processed and identied by the cortical pathway, the threat turns out to be real. Although the amygdala is critical for fear conditioning, it also plays a broader, noncritical role in other types of learning and memory. The amygdala can modulate the function of other memory systems, particularly the hippocampal memory system necessary for declarative or episodic memory. McGaugh, Introini-Collision, Cahill, Munsoo, and Liang (1992) have shown that when an animal is aroused, the storage of hippocampal-dependent memory is enhanced. This enhanced storage with arousal depends on the amygdala. The amygdala modulates storage by altering consolidation. Consolidation is a process that occurs after initial encoding by which a memory becomes more or less setor permanent. McGaugh (2000) has suggested that perhaps one adaptive function of this slow consolidation process is to allow the neurohormonal changes that occur with emotion to alter memory. In this way, events that elicit emotional reactions, and thus may be more important for survival, are remembered better than nonemotional events. This secondary role of modulating the consolidation of hippocampal-dependent memories with mild arousal is another way the amygdala can inuence emotional memory. The research on the role of the amygdala in nonhuman animals has laid the groundwork for investigations in humans. It is impossible to investigate neural systems in humans with the specicity of research with nonhuman animals. However, to the extent that we obtain similar results with similar paradigms in humans, we can assume that we are tapping into the same basic neural processes across species. Fear conditioning has been shown to be a primary means of emotional learning across a range of species, including humans (LeDoux, 1996). An investigation into the role of the human amygdala in fear conditioning can serve as basis for understanding the relation between the amygdala, emotional learning, and cognitive awareness.

The Amygdala and Fear Conditioning in Humans: Evidence for the Independence of Emotional Learning and Cognitive AwarenessFear-conditioning procedures are essentially the same across species. A typical paradigm in humans involves presenting a neutral stimulus, such as a blue square, and pairing it with an aversive stimulus, such as a mild shock to the wrist. The shock elicits physiological responses consistent with an averThe Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 63

sive emotional stimulus. For instance, autonomic nervous system arousal occurs as part of a fear response, one measure of which would be an increase in the skin conductance response (SCR), an indicator of the mild sweating that occurs with arousal. After a few trials of pairing the blue square and shock, the blue square begins to elicit an SCR when presented alone. This conditioned response indicates that the previously neutral blue square has acquired aversive properties. Fear-conditioning paradigms, like the one just described, were conducted with normal subjects while examining brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These studies reported activation of the amygdala during fear conditioning in response to the conditioned stimulus (Buchel, Morris, Dolan, & Friston, 1998; LaBar, Gatenby, Gore, LeDoux, & Phelps, 1998). In one study, the strength of the conditioned response was correlated with the magnitude of amygdala activation (LaBar et al., 1998). When this paradigm was conducted on patients suffering from amygdala damage, they failed to acquire a conditioned response to the neutral, conditioned stimulus even after several pairings with the aversive stimulus (Bechara et al., 1995; LaBar, LeDoux, Spencer, & Phelps, 1995). They failed to acquire this conditioned response in spite of a normal fear response to the stimulus that was inherently aversive (e.g., shock). These results provide support for the conclusion that the amygdala in humans, as in other species, is necessary for the acquisition and expression of a conditioned response. However, when conducting the studies with patients suffering from amygdala damage it became apparent that even though these patients failed to show a physiological indicator of a conditioned response, they had a very good cognitive understanding of the fear-conditioning paradigm. They could verbally report the events of the procedure and the relationship between the neutral stimulus and the aversive event, including the fact that the neutral stimulus came to predict the aversive event. An example of this is patient SP, who suffers from bilateral damage to the amygdala but has little other signicant brain injury. She was shown an example of her lack of an SCR to a blue square that had been paired with shock along with the data from a normal control subject (Phelps, 2002). When asked what she thought of her lack of a normal conditioned SCR to the blue square, she made the following comment:I knew that there was an anticipation that blue square, at some particular point in time, would bring on one of the volt shocks. But even though I knew that, and I knew that from the very beginning, except for the very rst one when I was surprised, that was my reactionI knew it was going to happen. So I learned from the very beginning that it was going to happen: blue-shock. And it happened. I turned out to be right. (p. 559)

64 Basic Mechanisms

It is clear that SP was aware of the relationship between the blue square and shock. To SP, the blue square predicted an aversive event and thus was no longer neutral, even though she failed to express this learning through an implicit physiological response. Bechara and colleagues (1995) conducted a similar study in another patient with bilateral amygdala damage, along with patients with hippocampal damage that suffered from amnesia. Like SP, the patient with a damaged amygdala was able to report the relationship between the neutral and aversive events but failed to demonstrate any physiological evidence of a learned conditioned response. The patients with hippocampal damage showed the opposite pattern of results. These patients demonstrated normal conditioned responses as measured by SCR. However, they had no conscious recollection of the fear-conditioning paradigm and could not verbally report the relationship between the neutral and aversive events. The hippocampal memory system is necessary for forming lasting representations of the relations between the multiple cues that make up the learning context or episode (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1993). In humans, the impairment following hippocampal damage, called anterograde amnesia, results in a decit in the ability to explicitly or consciously remember events (Squire, 1986). When undergoing fear conditioning, the amygdala and hippocampal memory systems are acting simultaneously, but are independent. The amygdala forms a link between the automatic physiological responses that occur with an emotional reaction and the neutral conditioned stimulus. This link underlies the conditioned response that is expressed automatically and implicitly. The hippocampus encodes the relations between the many events that make up the fear-conditioning procedures, allowing for the conscious recollection and cognitive understanding of the fear-conditioning paradigm. In normal human subjects, both types of learning are available and can be expressed. Damage to the amygdala only impairs the learned implicit physiological emotional response, but leaves cognitive awareness intact. It is interesting to note that humans with amygdala damage do not display the type of impaired emotional responses apparent in monkeys suffering from Kluver-Bucy syndrome (Anderson & Phelps, 2002). This may be because in humans the conscious recollection and understanding of the relationship between stimuli and their potential aversive consequences is sufcient to guide action in most circumstances. Unlike other animals, humans may not need to rely on physiological indicators when choosing what types of stimuli or situations to approach or avoid. Although there may be circumstances in which our learned physiological responses are important in guiding normal behavior (Damasio, 1999), in most circumstances patients with amygdala damage are able to function fairly well without this type of learned response.

The Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 65

The studies examining the role of the human amygdala in fear conditioning raise an issue that was not apparent in research with nonhuman animals. As in other animals, the amygdala in humans is critical for the acquisition and physiological expression of a conditioned response. However, the amygdala is not necessary for a cognitive awareness and understanding of the episode of fear conditioning. This dissociation between automatic emotional response and conscious recollection and awareness indicates that the amygdala and some emotional responses can operate independently of cognitive awareness. For the rest of this chapter, I focus on how these two independent factors can inuence each other.

The Inuence of Cognitive Awareness on the Amygdala/Emotion System: Instructed Fear

Learning with the fear-conditioning paradigm requires that subjects have direct experience with an aversive event in conjunction with a neutral event. Awareness of the relation between the neutral and aversive events occurs only after they have been paired, usually a few times. However, there are other means by which humans can learn that a neutral stimulus represents a potential aversive outcome. Humans can learn through verbal instruction. For example, you might fear a neighborhood dog because the dog once bit you. However, you might also fear a neighborhood dog because your neighbor mentioned in conversation that it is a mean dog that might bite you. In the second scenario, there is no direct experience with the dog and an aversive event; rather, there is an awareness and understanding of the aversive properties of the dog. When simply being told that the dog is unfriendly and could be dangerous, it is unlikely you would experience an emotional response. However, if you were to encounter the dog, you would likely have an emotional reaction. This learning without direct experience relies on instruction and verbal communication. In humans, this type of learning is common. In many circumstances, we do not have to experience aversive events to learn which stimuli or situations to avoid because we have been warned. As mentioned earlier, the acquisition of knowledge about the relation between events that is available for conscious recollection and awareness depends on the hippocampus. Patients with amygdala damage who did not have extensive additional hippocampal damage are able to acquire and recollect this cognitive understanding of the emotional properties of stimuli learned through instruction. The question remains, however, whether having a cognitive awareness of the emotional properties of a stimulus, without direct experience, will inuence or involve the amygdala.66 Basic Mechanisms

The role of the amygdala in learning through instruction was assessed using a paradigm called instructed fear (Phelps et al., 2001). As in the fearconditioning paradigm described previously, a blue square was paired with shock. However, instead of the subjects actually experiencing the blue square and shock together, they were simply told that they might receive a shock to the wrist when the blue square was presented. None of the subjects in this study actually received a shock, although all of the subjects indicated that they believed the instructions and thought they would receive a shock at some time when the blue square was presented. When SCR was assessed, all of the subjects showed increased arousal to the blue square, consistent with a mild fear response that might occur when one is anticipating a shock to the wrist. This study was conducted while amygdala responses were being assessed using fMRI. There was an increase of activation of the amygdala during the presentation of the blue square that was verbally linked to a potential shock. Across subjects, the magnitude of this amygdala activation was correlated with the magnitude of the SCR response to the blue square. These results suggest that the amygdala may respond when there is an awareness and understanding of the emotional properties of a stimulus in the absence of any direct experience. As mentioned previously, patients with amygdala damage who have a relatively intact hippocampus can acquire a representation of the emotional properties of stimuli through instruction and can consciously recollect this knowledge when asked. However, do these patients show normal physiological responses to these types of stimuli? To address this question, patients with amygdala damage participated in the instructed fear procedure (Funayama, Grillon, Davis, & Phelps, 2001). After instruction, all of the patients had acquired a cognitive awareness and understanding of the aversive properties of the blue square (i.e., indicating the possibility of a shock) and verbally reported this knowledge to the experimenter. However, in spite of this cognitive awareness, the patients failed to demonstrate a normal physiological indicator of fear in response to the blue square. In other words, even though the patients explicitly knew that the blue square indicated a potential shock, their physical responses did not demonstrate this knowledge. These results, when combined with the fMRI results, indicate that the amygdala is involved when there is a cognitive awareness of the aversive properties of events acquired without direct aversive experience, and that the amygdalas role in this situation is to modulate some physiological indicators of this learned emotional response. These studies demonstrate that cognitive awareness can inuence the amygdala. They are important because they extend the amygdalas role in emotional learning beyond fear conditioning, to the expression of fears that are imagined and anticipated but never actually experienced. Unlike fear conditioning, the amygdala does not play a role in the acquisition of fear learningThe Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 67

with instruction. However, its role in the modulation of the physiological expression of the learned emotional response appears to be similar in the two paradigms. Even though the amygdala can operate independently of conscious knowledge and awareness, this type of cognitive awareness interacts with the amygdala to produce normal emotional reactions in certain circumstances.

The Inuence of the Amygdala/Emotion System on Cognitive Awareness The Modulation of Long-Term Conscious RecollectionIn the earlier review of research on the role of the amygdala in nonhuman animals, it was mentioned that the amygdala has a secondary role in emotional memory, specically the modulation of the storage of hippocampaldependent memories with arousal (McGaugh, 2000). In humans, hippocampal-dependent memories are the types of representations that are available for explicit or conscious recollection, and are what we refer to most often when we use the term memory in everyday speech. At the time an event occurs, we are usually aware of a great deal of what is happening. However, over time we forget. After even a week, it may difcult to recollect a number of events that occurred. For instance, most of us cannot remember what we ate for lunch a week ago, even though we were certainly aware of it at the time. With the passage of time, we can only consciously recollect a portion of the events that have occurred in our lives, even though we were fully aware of them at the time they occurred. To the extent that the amygdala modulates the retention or consolidation of hippocampal-dependent memories, it inuences the events that are available for long-term conscious recollection. This is one way in which the amygdala may inuence cognitive awareness. Several studies with humans have examined the amygdalas role in the modulation of hippocampal-dependent memories with arousal. These studies asked subjects to recall or recognize emotional stimuli that elicit an arousal response. One of the rst studies examining this question used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine the relation between recall for neutral and arousing lm clips and glucose metabolism in the amygdala while subjects viewed these lms (Cahill et al., 1996). This study found that subjects who had greater glucose metabolism in the amygdala at the time of initial viewing of the arousing lm clips showed better recall of these lm clips 2 weeks later. There was no relationship between amygdala glucose metabolism and later recall for the neutral lm clips. Another PET study (Cahill,

68 Basic Mechanisms

Babinsky, Markowitsch, & McGaugh, 1995) and a later fMRI study (Canili, Zhao, Brewer, Gabrieli, & Cahill, 2000; Hamann, Ely, Grafton, & Kilts, 1999) conrmed these results. In the fMRI study, the correlation was within subjects. Subjects were more likely to later recollect a highly emotional slide if that slide elicited amygdala activation when it was rst encountered. These brain imaging studies indicate that for emotional stimuli, the amygdala response during encoding can partially predict long-term retention. Studies examining patients with amygdala damage conrm a role for the amygdala in the ability to consciously recollect arousing events over time. In one of the rst studies of this type (Cahill et al., 1995), normal control subjects and patients with amygdala damage were shown a slide show with a narrative. In one version of this slide show, the slides in the middle of the show depicted an arousing, negative event (i.e., a boy is hit by a car and his legs are severed and reattached). Control subjects and patients rated the slides from the middle portion as equally arousing and more arousing than slides from the rest of the show. When asked to recognize details from the slides several days later, normal control subjects recollected the arousing slides better than the neutral slides. Patients with amygdala damage did not show a signicant advantage for the arousing slides, indicating a decit in the enhancement of hippocampal-dependent memories with arousal. The ndings with nonhuman animals examining the role of the amygdala in the modulation of the hippocampus suggest that the amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories with arousal. As mentioned earlier, consolidation is a process that occurs over time by which memories become more or less permanent. If arousal is modulating consolidation, then the effect of arousal should emerge over time. In other words, if recollection is assessed immediately after learning, when consolidation processes have not yet had time occur, any effect of emotion could not be due to the modulation of consolidation. The effect of consolidation can only be observed if recollection occurs after a delay, when there has been sufcient time for consolidation processes. The effect of arousal on consolidation should be reected in recollection over time, specically in the rate of forgetting. A number of psychological studies suggest that arousal slows the rate of forgetting, resulting in greater retention of memories of emotional events (e.g., Kleinsmith & Kaplan, 1963). In an effort to determine if the amygdala is modulating the rate of forgetting for arousing events, LaBar and Phelps (1998) examined forgetting curves for the recall of arousing and nonarousing words in normal control subjects and patients with amygdala damage. The forgetting rates for control subjects were consistent with previous studies. Over time, they forgot fewer of the arousing words than the neutral words. For patients with amygdala damage, however, there was no difference in the rate of forgetting for arousing and neutral words. The patients forgot an equal number of the arousing

The Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 69

and neutral words. These results are consistent with animal models, suggesting that the amygdala modulates the consolidation or storage of hippocampal-dependent memories with arousal. In general, emotional events are consciously recollected over time better than neutral events. When we look back upon our lives, the memories that seem to last are those of emotional or signicant events. One mechanism (of many) by which memories for emotional events is enhanced is the amygdalas modulation of the hippocampal consolidation with arousal (Phelps et al., 1998). To the extent that the amygdala is altering our ability to consciously recollect information, it is exerting an inuence on our cognitive awareness for the events of our lives.

The Modulation of Perceptual Encoding

Another mechanism by which the amygdala and emotion may inuence cognition is modulating which information in the environment reaches awareness. At any given time, we are bombarded with sensory input. Only a portion of this input is available for cognitive awareness. With attention, we can select a subset of information in the environment for awareness and further cognitive processing. However, our attentional resources and the amount of information we can keep in mind at any one time are limited (see Lachman, Buttereld, & Lachman, 1979). Early research on attentional selection demonstrated that meaningful and important information may be more likely to break through our limited attentional resources and reach awareness (Moray, 1959). A number of other psychological studies have conrmed that attention and awareness may be inuenced by the emotional content of a stimulus (Niedenthal & Kitayama, 1994). If emotional stimuli are more likely to reach awareness, then information about the emotional signicance of a stimulus must be processed prior to awareness in some way. A number of researchers (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Ohman & Mineka, 2001) have suggested that the emotional qualities of a stimulus may be processed more automatically (i.e., without requiring elaborative cognitive processing) than the nonemotional qualities. For instance, in a classic study, Murphy and Zajonc (1993) demonstrated that an emotional face presented so briey it is impossible to detect or identify can inuence the rating of a neutral stimulus presented immediately afterward. This automaticity of emotional processing suggests that emotion information is available at the earliest stages of stimulus processing. The amygdala has been shown to respond to the emotional signicance of stimuli automatically, prior to cognitive awareness. A number of fMRI studies have shown amygdala activation to the presentation of faces with fearful expressions (e.g., Breiter et al., 1996). In an effort to determine if this amyg70 Basic Mechanisms

dala response to fear faces is automatic, Whalen and colleagues (1998) presented these faces so quickly that subjects were unaware of their presentation. They found that the amygdala response to faces presented subliminally was as robust as the response to faces that were presented with awareness. In other words, the amygdalas response to the emotional quality of the fearful face stimulus appears to be automatic, not requiring awareness, identication, or additional cognitive processing (see also Morris, Ohman, & Dolan, 1998). The psychological studies on emotion and awareness indicate that the emotional quality of a stimulus can be processed automatically, without cognitive awareness, and that this automatic processing of emotion can inuence attention and awareness. The cognitive neuroscience research suggests that the amygdala can detect the emotional properties of a stimulus prior to explicit identication and awareness. The question remains whether this automatic detection of emotion by the amygdala has a role in the modulation of awareness for emotional events. The amygdalas role in modulating awareness for emotional events was examined using a paradigm called the attentional blink (Chun & Potter, 1995; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). In this paradigm, subjects are presented a series of around 15 items very quickly, about one every 100 ms. At this presentation rate, subjects are aware that something is being presented, but the items go by so quickly that they are unable to identify any of them. To make the task easier, subjects are told that they do not need to identify all of the items, but that they should concentrate on identifying only two of the items, called Target 1 (T1) and Target 2 (T2). These items can be distinguished from the ignore items by some salient characteristic; for instance, they may be printed in green ink instead of black ink. When subjects have to identify only 2 of the 15 items, they are successful most of the time. However, the success rate for reporting T2 items drops off signicantly if T2 is presented soon after T1. For instance, if T1 is the second item presented (of 15 total) and T2 is the ninth item, then subjects are likely to report both items. However, if T1 is the second item and T2 is the fourth item, subjects are likely to miss T2 and will not be able to identify it. A short lag (one to three intervening items) between T1 and T2 impairs the ability to identify and report T2. It is as if noticing and encoding T1 creates a brief refractory period during which it is difcult to notice and encode a second item. In other words, it is as if attention blinked. Using this standard paradigm, Anderson and Phelps (2001) manipulated the emotional salience of T2. The stimuli they used were arousing words and nonarousing neutral words. With neutral words, they found the standard attentional blink effect. That is, subjects had difculty reporting T2 when it came soon after T1. However, when T2 was an arousing word, they found that the blink effect was diminished. In other words, subjects were more likelyThe Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 71

to report a T2 word presented at a short lag if it was arousing rather than neutral. The ability to report the T1 words was unaffected by emotion. This enhanced ability to identify an arousing T2 word during the blink period suggests that when attentional resources are limited, emotional stimuli are more likely to reach cognitive awareness than neutral stimuli. To determine if the amygdala is playing a role in the emotional modulation of the attentional blink effect, this paradigm was conducted on patients with amygdala damage and normal control subjects (Anderson & Phelps, 2001). The normal control subjects showed the pattern described above. That is, the blink effect was diminished for the arousing words, suggesting enhanced perceptual encoding and awareness for emotional stimuli. The patients with amygdala damage failed to show any difference in their ability to report arousing and neutral T2 words. For both types of words, patients showed a signicant and equal decit in the ability to report the T2 word when it was presented in a short lag position following the T1 word. Patients with amygdala lesions failed to show the emotional modulation of the attentional blink effect. These results suggest that the amygdala not only recognizes the emotional signicance of an event early in stimulus processing, but that this early processing will then alter later perceptual encoding. The amygdala has reciprocal connections with a number of sensory cortical regions (Amaral, Price, Pitkanen, & Carmichael, 1992). For instance, early visual cortical areas project to the amygdala, and the amygdala projects back to these regions. A study with nonhuman animals recording from neurons in both the amygdala and visual cortex indicated that the amygdala response to an emotional stimulus is correlated with a change in the baseline ring rate of neurons in the visual cortex (Kapp, Wilson, Pascoe, Supple, & Whalen, 1990). In other words, when the amygdala responds to an emotional event, the visual cortex shows enhanced neural processing as well. An fMRI study in humans has also shown a correlation between amygdala activation to an emotional stimulus and visual cortex activation to the same stimulus (Morris, Friston, et al., 1998). These results imply that early in visual processing the amygdala may receive information about a stimulus, and if the amygdala responds to this stimulus, it may then modulate later visual processing. This type of feedback mechanism, where the amygdala receives information about the emotional salience of a stimulus early in perceptual processing and in turn modulates later perceptual processing, may underlie the enhanced perceptual encoding for emotional stimuli observed with the attentional blink. The results with the attentional blink paradigm (Anderson & Phelps, 2001) demonstrate that the amygdala modulates the enhanced perceptual encoding of emotional stimuli. Altering the information that may break through limited attentional resources to reach cognitive awareness is another mechanism by which the amygdala inuences cognition. In situations where attentional72 Basic Mechanisms

resources are challenged, the automaticity of processing for emotional stimuli ensures that this information is more likely to get our full attention.

ConclusionThis chapter has explored the relation between emotion and cognition by examining the interaction of the amygdala and cognitive awareness. The amygdala and cognitive awareness can operate independently. The amygdala is necessary for the acquisition and physiological expression of fear conditioning, which does not require awareness. A cognitive awareness and understanding of the episode of fear conditioning is acquired and expressed independently of the amygdala and the conditioned response. However, these two independent factors, the amygdala and cognitive awareness, also interact in subtle but important ways. Cognitive awareness can inuence the amygdala. Having an awareness and understanding of the emotional properties of an event does not require the amygdala, but such knowledge will alter amygdala processing, which in turn modulates some physiological expressions of emotion. The amygdala also inuences cognitive awareness in a few ways. First, the amygdala alters our ability over time to consciously recollect events that are emotional and important. Second, the amygdala can modulate perception and attention by increasing the likelihood that emotional information in the environment will break through to cognitive awareness. The interactions between the amygdala and cognitive awareness suggest a complex picture of the relation between cognition and emotion. It no longer seems fruitful to debate whether cognition and emotion are independent or interdependent. Research on the neural systems of emotion and cognition suggest that they are both. By combining research and theories from psychological, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroscience approaches, we can begin to achieve a more complete understanding of the relationship between emotion and cognitive awareness. ReferencesAggleton, J. P. (Ed.). (1992). The amygdala: Neurobiological aspects of emotion, memory and mental dysfunction. New York: Wiley-Liss. Amaral, D. G., Price, J. L., Pitkanen, A., & Carmichael, S. T. (1992). In J. P. Aggleton (Ed.), The amygdala (p. 166). New York: Wiley-Liss. Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2001). Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Nature, 411, 305309. Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2002). Is the amygdala critical for the subjective experience of emotion? Evidence of intact dispositional affect in patients with amygdala lesions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 112. Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, L. (1999). The unbearable automacity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462479.The Interaction of Emotion and Cognition 73

4The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential ApplicationsAp Dijksterhuis, Henk Aarts, and Pamela K. Smith

In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self? Henri Poincare

In the past century, a few hundred articles have been published about subliminal perception and applications such as subliminal persuasion (see Dixon, 1971, 1981). This number suggests a mature eld of research, in which, as in any mature eld, researchers agree on a number of well-documented ndings and argue over more recent contributions. However, in the eld of subliminal perception and persuasion, scientists agree that the eld is controversial and argue over everything else. Despite numerous ndings demonstrating effects of subliminal perception, some people still maintain that the phenomenon itself does not even exist. Holender (1986), for instance, drew the conclusion that subliminal perception had never been reliably demonstrated, which led Dixon (who reviewed the eld twice in 1971 and 1981) to comment thatthe most interesting phenomenon to which Holenders paper draws attention is the extraordinary antipathy some people still have towards the idea that we might be inuenced by things of which we are unaware. Would it be putting it too strongly to say it reminds one of the skepticism of at earth theorists when confronted with the alarming theory that the world is round? (Dixon, 1986, p. 30; see also Merikle & Reingold, 1992)

The empirical study of subliminal perception started over a hundred years ago.1 Peirce and Jastrow (1884) showed that participants (actually Peirce and Jastrow themselves) could discriminate between two objects on the basis77

of their weights even when the difference in weight was so small that it could not be detected consciously. After choosing between objects, they indicated their condence on a scale from 0 to 3, with a higher score representing more condence. On almost all trials, they chose zero. However, they chose the correct object on more than 60% of the occasions. Although he minor differences in weight may have escaped consciousness, unconscious processes dealt with them with reasonable accuracy. In addition, they obtained comparable data with pressures that differed slightly in intensity and surfaces that differed slightly in brightness. Other pioneering work was done by Sidis (1898; described in Merikle & Reingold, 1992, p. 58) and by Potzl (1917/1960). In Sidiss work, subjects were shown cards containing a single digit or letter, but these cards were so far away that the subject saw nothing but a dim, blurred spot or dot (Sidis, 1898, p. 170). In fact, the subjects often complained that they could not see anything at all; that even the black, blurred, dim spot often disappeared from their eld of vision (p. 171). However, when Sidis asked the subjects to name the character on the card, their responses were correct more often than would be expected on the basis of pure random guessing, even though many subjects stated that they might as well shut their eyes and guess (p. 171). Finally, Potzl (1917/1960) investigated the consequences of subliminal perception on imagery during dreams. He showed participants various pictures for very short durations (10 ms) and predicted that although these pictures could not reach conscious awareness, they would remain active subconsciously long enough to be able to present themselves in dreams. According to Potzl, some of the images recurred in the dreams of the experimental participants. In the rst half of the twentieth century, others replicated and extended the aforementioned early studies (see Adams, 1957, for a review). On the basis of these ndings, one may be excused for not grasping why the study of subliminal perception is so controversial. After all, the eld appears to have had a promising start. When a few people report interesting results and when a few others replicate and extend these results, one would normally conclude that a healthy new eld has been born. In our view, there are two (interacting) reasons for the unusual development of the eld of subliminal perception. First of all, the idea that our behavioror our functioning in generalis driven by unconscious perception makes many people uncomfortable. As Nrretranders (1998, p. 158) pointed out, the notion that human behavior can be inuenced by perceptions which do not lead to consciousness but merely remain in the organism has always been associated with considerable fear. The second reason is James Vicary and the notion of subliminal persuasion. Subliminal persuasion refers to the subliminal presentation of stimuli by people (e.g., advertisers) who intentionally try to inuence our behavior. Vicary claimed in 1957 that he78 Basic Mechanisms

increased the sales of popcorn and cola after subliminally ashing Eat Popcorn and Drink Coke in a New Jersey cinema. This caused a stir both inside and outside the scientic community. A few years later, Vicary admitted that his (nonreliable) results did not warrant strong conclusions and that there was no evidence at all for subliminal persuasion, but the damage had already been done. The number of researchers seriously working on the topic decreased dramatically for at least the next 20 years. Moreover, the few experimental psychologists that did publish on subliminal phenomena were far from supportive. Some indicated that the chance that subliminal persuasion could ever work was extremely remote (Moore, 1982) or worse, that the whole idea was just a myth and that we should stop investigating it altogether (Pratkanis, 1992; see also Packard, 1978). But is it a myth? Should we stop? In this chapter, we argue that we should not stop and that subliminal persuasion and other applications of subliminal stimulation should be investigated, not ignored. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four parts. First, we discuss our denition of subliminal perception. We also present arguments for why it is impossible, or at least difcult, to maintain that all (important) behavior should be the result of conscious thought. In the second part, examples of basic effects of subliminal stimulation are used to demonstrate what subliminal stimulation can do. Third, a crude theoretical basis for the effects of subliminal persuasion and other applications is provided, relying largely on social cognition research. In the fourth and most important part, we discuss research relevant for the practical, commercial, or political use of subliminal stimulation. A distinction is made between (a) the manipulation of attitudes by subliminal evaluative conditioning, (b) the inuence of subliminal messages on consumer behavior, and (c) the inuence of subliminal messages on health. With these empirical results, we hope to show that applications of subliminal stimulation are worthy of space on the scientic agenda. In our concluding section, we discuss three arguments in favor of the study of subliminal perception.

Denition Issues A Note on Thresholds

Both the content and the tone of many publications on subliminal phenomena have been affected by the fear and antipathy they elicit. One example, important for the present purposes, is the effort to dene subliminal perception out of existence (Eriksen, 1960; Holender, 1986). The denition of subliminal perception was a topic of hot debate in the mid-1980s (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984, 1986; Fowler, 1986; Holender, 1986; Wolford, 1986; see also Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, & Tataryn, 1992). TheThe Power of the Subliminal 79

discussion was based on the concepts of objective and subjective thresholds (e.g., Cheesman & Merikle, 1984). An objective threshold has to be passed for a stimulus to be sensed, that is, to enter the appropriate sensory system. A subjective threshold is one that has to be passed for a stimulus to enter conscious awareness. If the objective threshold is not passed, perception does not occur. If the objective threshold is passed but the subjective is not, subliminal perception occurs. If the subjective is passed as well, conscious perception occurs. Holender (1986) argued that researchers could not rely on the subjective threshold as a measure of conscious perception. Instead, Holender said that only an objective threshold could be a dependable dening criterion. He argued that when there is some demonstrable sensory effect of a stimulusthat is, if the objective threshold is reachedit can never be guaranteed that people did not also become conscious of the stimulus. Imagine sitting in front of a computer screen on which a word is briey shown. It goes so fast that you only see a ash. You do not know which word it was. According to Holender, if you cannot verbally report a stimulus, this does not necessarily mean that it did not reach consciousness. Maybe it reached consciousness half a second ago and you forgot. It should be clear that this sole reliance on the objective threshold proposed by Holender effectively rules the phenomenon of subliminal perception out of existence, as noted by Kihlstrom and colleagues (1992, p. 20). Most researchers disagreed with Holender (1986). He imposed a criterion that ignores an essential aspect of consciousness: awareness. A denition of consciousness must appeal to the notion of awareness, not just to some psychophysiological denition of detection. As Paap (1986, p. 45) in his comment on Holender noted, it simply does not make sense to say that the thermostat in my house is conscious of New Mexicos hot days and cool evenings. Nrretranders (1998; see also Jaynes, 1976; Libet, 1985) argued convincingly that consciousness should be treated as a primary phenomenon. What is in consciousness is in consciousness; what is not is not. If one wants to know what is in consciousness, one should ask consciousness itself. Or, as Nrretranders (1998, p. 226) puts it, conciousness is a primary phenomenon, which the experimenter has no right to argue with. So subliminal perception is perception that passes the objective threshold (i.e., it is discriminated by the senses) but fails to pass the subjective threshold (i.e., it fails to reach conscious awareness and cannot be reported verbally). But can we determine this subjective threshold? Not really, or at least not in an absolute sense. There is no xed subjective threshold that works for all people under all circumstances. The idea of a xed threshold has been superseded as a consequence of insights from signal detection theory (see e.g., Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996). Whether a briey presented stimulus does reach conscious awareness or not depends on stable individual differences, on current goals and needs, and on various contextual effects.80 Basic Mechanisms

Some have argued that as there is no such thing as a xed subjective threshold, we should abandon the term subliminal (limen means threshold in Latin) altogether (e.g., Kihlstrom et al., 1992), and instead use terms such as implicit or unconscious perception instead. We chose to use subliminal because it is the term most often used to describe these phenomena (see also Greenwald et al., 1996). Implicit or unconscious perception refers to perception that does not reach conscious awareness, but these terms do not distinguish between the various reasons why the information did not enter consciousness. A perceived stimulus may not enter consciousness because it is presented very briey. However, a perceived stimulus also may not enter consciousness because little attention is paid to it; with a bit more attention the stimulus could have entered consciousness. For instance, while driving a car people see many billboards, although the information on these billboards never reaches conscious awareness, simply because people do not pay attention to them. With more attention, the information on the billboards would enter consciousness. This is implicit perception or unconscious perception. However, subliminal perception is generally used to refer to stimuli that are presented in such a way that they cannot reach conscious awareness, even if attention is directed to them. This, then, is also the denition we adopt for this chapter.2

Do We Really Want Consciousness to Be in Charge?

Researchers who investigate subliminal perception (or even unconscious psychology in general) have always met with some resistance. Many people simply want to believe that subliminal perception does not exist. Others, forced to admit there is something to it after hearing about one or more convincing demonstrations, downplay its importance. This is rooted in the fear that we (our consciousness) are not in control of our behavior, and in the belief that conscious thought should mediate everything we do, at least when our behavior and the decisions we make become more important. But should we really hold onto that belief? Do we really always want conscious thought to produce, or at least mediate, our behavior? First of all, and strictly speaking, conscious thought does not exist. Thought, when dened as producing meaningful associative constructions, happens unconsciously (Jaynes, 1976). One may be aware of some of the elements of a thought process or one may be aware of a product of a thought process, but one is not aware of thought itself. Watt (1905; see also Jaynes, 1976; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) demonstrated the inaccessibility of thought to consciousness. In his experiment, participants were presented with nouns (e.g., oak) and were asked to come up with a particular association as quickly as they could. Sometimes, participants were required to associate the noun withThe Power of the Subliminal 81

a superordinate word (oak-tree), while on other occasions they were to name a part (oak-acorn) or a subordinate (oak-beam). The idea was that conscious thinking could be divided into four stages: the instructions (e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the noun (e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the uttered reply (e.g., tree). Participants were asked to introspect on all four stages separately, to assess the contribution of consciousness during each stage. Of course, the third stage (searching for an association) is the stage during which the actual thinking takes place and hence, it is during this stage that one would have expected conscious thought. This stage, however, was introspectively blank: participants could not report anything. The instruction in combination with the presentation of the noun automatically started the thinking process. And this thinking occurred outside of conscious awareness. Importantly, this is true for all thought, not just an elementary experiment on word association, and for important creative processes as well. Thinking about an article we want to write is an unconscious affair. We read and talk, but only to acquire the necessary materials for our unconscious mechanisms to chew on. We are consciously aware of some of the products of thought that sometimes intrude into consciousness (I have to use the article by Watt to get this message across!), but not of the thinkingor chewingitself. Frankly, we think we should be happy that thought is unconscious. Nrretranders (1998) summarizes results from the 1950s and 1960s, when a number of people were interested in human processing capacity. Their research was devoted to the processing capacity of consciousness and of the senses. The processing capacity of the senses can be seen as our total processing capacity. In order to compare different forms of information (e.g., tactile versus visual versus auditory), information was measured in bits. As it turned out, our senses can handle about 11 million bits per second (Zimmermann, 1989; see Nrretranders, 1998, for a detailed analysis). This whopping number is largely the result of our sophisticated visual system, which can handle about 10 million bits per second. The processing capacity of consciousness pales in comparison. The exact number of bits consciousness can process depends on the task. When we read silently, we process about a maximum of 45 bits per second (a few words); when we read aloud, it drops to 30. When we calculate (e.g., when we multiply two numbers), we can handle only 12 bits per second. Compared to our total capacity, these numbers are incredibly small. If we conclude that our consciousness can process 50 bits per second (which is optimistic; see Kupfmuller, 1962; Nrretranders, 1998), our total capacity is 200,000 times as high as the capacity of consciousness. In other words, consciousness can only deal with a very small percentage of all incoming information. All the rest is processed without awareness. Lets be grateful that unconscious mechanisms help out whenever there is a real job to be done, such as thinking.82 Basic Mechanisms

The enormous processing capacity of the unconscious is very important. One of the authors of this chapter recently bought an apartment. Between the moment he rst entered the building to explore it and the moment he made a bid, all of about 10 minutes passed (it was a two-bedroom apartment, so exploring it didnt take long). Intuitively, one may say that this is a very poor way of deciding. Granted, if the decision to buy this apartment was based solely on conscious processes, it would have been very poor indeed. Consciousness cannot accomplish much within 10 minutes, as we have seen. However, the decision was based on a sense that this place just feels very good; lets do it (and obviously on a few things that were known beforehand, such as the location of the building and the quality of its foundations). Many people take days or weeks to decide to buy a home, but the real decision is often made in a matter of minutes. The remaining time is used to make such an important decision feel less scary and maybe to rule out a few potential risks. The reason we can make such a decision fast is that within 10 minutes, unconscious perception and unconscious thought can process (about) 6.6 billion bits. This sense of it feels good; lets do it (see also Damasio, 1994), then, could well be based on an enormous amount of information. One could defend that from a normative perspective (more than 6 billion bits!), it isnt a poor way of deciding.3 Do we really want to depend primarily on consciousness? We should appreciate unconscious perception. Without it, we would not be able to accomplish much at all. If we assume, on the basis of the previous paragraph, that it takes the processing of roughly 6.6 billion bits to decide to buy a house, consciousness alone would need 4 years to make such a decision. Importantly, if we accept that unconscious perceptual processes have a paramount inuence on human functioning, then we also should accept that subliminal perception may have far-reaching consequences. We cannot agree that many things are perceived and processed unconsciously and at the same time rule out the possibility that subliminal exposure to stimuli can affect us.

The Strings We Can Pull

As alluded to above, for many years the question of whether subliminal perception did exist was a topic of hot debate. More recently, however, evidence for subliminal perception has accumulated. As a result, the controversy has shifted more and more toward the question of what exactly can be elicited by exposure to subliminal stimuli. Does subliminal perception only have relatively innocent and brief semantic effects, or can it affect more important matters such as our emotional life or our overt behavior? In concrete terms, if we subliminally ash the word steak, what are the consequences? Does it prime the associated word cow? Does it cause changes in affect so that vegeThe Power of the Subliminal 83

tarians have a strong negative reaction and hungry nonvegetarians have a strong positive reaction? Does it affect behavior? Are we getting hungry? In sum, exactly which strings can we pull subliminally? In this section, we point at some evidence of the known consequences of subliminal stimulation. For now, we restrict ourselves to effects on nonapplied domains, and we discuss one or two examples from each domain. We differentiate between (a) neurological correlates, (b) evaluative and affective effects, (c) semantic effects, (d) effects on social judgments, and (e) effects on overt behavior.

Neurological CorrelatesLibet, Alberts, Wright, and Feinstein (1967) were presumably the rst to provide physiological evidence for subliminal perception. In their experiments, they stimulated the skin of their participants so subtly participants could not consciously report it. Concurrently measured evoked potentials, however, showed changes in the electrical eld around the brain. Although their measurements were crude, they did provide unequivocal evidence for brain activity as a result of perception that escaped conscious awareness. Later, Dehaene et al. (1998) and Whalen et al. (1998) also reported evidence of neurological effects of subliminal stimulation.

Evaluative and Affective Effects

In 1968, Zajonc launched the idea of mere exposure: the more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more we like it. Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc (1980) rst demonstrated that even subliminal exposure to a stimulus enhances ones attitude toward this stimulus. In their experiment, participants were presented with 10 polygons, each ve times for only 1 ms. Afterward, participants were presented with pairs of polygons, consisting of an old (e.g., previously presented) and a new polygon. For each pair, participants had to indicate which one they thought was previously presented to them and which one they liked most. Participants more often preferred the previously presented polygon to the new one, without being able to say which polygon had been presented. This subliminal mere exposure effect has been replicated a number of times since (see Bornstein, 1992, for a review).4

a word had appeared, participants were presented with a word stem with three letters of a word (e.g., sca-). Participants were requested to generate a ve-letter word to complete the presented word stem. In some conditions, participants were urged not to choose the word that had just been presented. Relative to a control condition in which the same word stem was presented without earlier exposure to an applicable subliminal word, people who were asked not to use the subliminally presented word used it more often. With this task, evidence was obtained for the semantic processing of a word while at the same time ensuring that this word was not consciously perceived (see also Marcel, 1983; Merikle, Joordens, & Stolz, 1995).

Social JudgmentsBargh and Pietromonaco (1982) showed that subliminally activated trait constructs affect the impression we form of others. Participants in their experiments were presented with ashes (actually words) on different locations on the screen and were asked to identify the location of each ash. Depending on the experimental condition, either 0%, 20%, or 80% of the words were associated with the trait construct of hostility. After completing this task, participants were presented with a brief description of a stimulus person who behaved in an ambiguously hostile way. The impression participants formed of this stimulus person was inuenced by their subliminal exposure to the words: the more hostile words presented earlier, the more negative the impression of the stimulus person became. Importantly, recognition memory for the ashed words did not exceed chance level. In later work, these ndings were replicated for subliminally activated social stereotypes (Devine, 1989; Lepore & Brown, 1997).

BehaviorResearch has demonstrated that activated trait constructs and social stereotypes not only affect judgments about others, but also affect participants own overt behavior. Activated traits and stereotypes bring behavior in line with the particular trait or stereotype (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998; see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001, for a review). Bargh and colleagues (1996, Experiment 3) found enhanced hostility among participants for whom the stereotype of African Americans was activated subliminally. In their experiment, participants performed a very laborious computer task. During this task, some participants were subliminally presented with photographs of male African Americans while others were subliminally presented with photographs of White males. After participants had been performing the task for a while, the computer program beeped, an error messageThe Power of the Subliminal 85

appeared, and participants were told that they had to start all over again. The participants were videotaped during the experiment and the dependent variable was the level of hostility participants displayed upon hearing that they had to redo the task. The experimenter (who was blind to conditions) and several independent coders rated the reaction of the participants primed with African American faces as more hostile than the reaction of the participants primed with White faces. Later, these effects were replicated and extended in other research (Chen & Bargh, 1997; Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh, & van Knippenberg, 2000; Dijksterhuis & Corneille, 2001). It should be clear from these many experiments that subliminal perception does much more than bring about small semantic effects. Subliminal perception can elicit affective responses, and it can inuence both social judgments and overt behavior.

Mental Representations Are Crucial

Some may nd the effects described in the previous section surprising. This surprise stems largely from the fact that these effects were elicited by subliminal stimulation. If effects such as the ones described above were the result of some form of a supraliminal (i.e., conscious) manipulation, they would be much less surprising. But is that justied? The surprise is based on the implicit assumption that our brain makes a distinction between supraliminal and subliminal priming episodes. That is, it is based on the idea that our brain cares whether something is primed with conscious mediation or without conscious mediation. We would like to argue, however, that 99 out of 100 times the brain does not care at all whether something is primed subliminally or supraliminally. We (i.e., humans) do, as shown by the strong reactions evoked by the possibility of effects of subliminally presented stimuli on behavior, but our brains do not. If the mental representation of hostile or woman is activated, certain psychological consequences follow, irrespective of whether activation of the word was the result of subliminal or supraliminal perception. Therefore, if supraliminal activation of a stimulus has a particular effect, subliminal activation of the same stimulus should have the same effect (for similar reasoning, see Bargh, 1989, 1992). In sum, it is the activation of a mental representation that is crucial for launching other psychological processes. The way this representation was activated (subliminal versus supraliminal) is not important. In the realm of social cognition, there is much support for the claim that activation of mental representations is crucial regardless of the way they were activated. A number of phenomena that were rst demonstrated with supraliminal presentation techniques were later replicated with subliminal tech86 Basic Mechanisms

niques. Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977; see Srull & Wyer, 1979, 1980, for other early demonstrations) showed that supraliminal exposure to trait terms inuences impressions we form of others. The previously discussed experiment by Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982) later demonstrated that this effect could be evoked by subliminal activation of a trait construct as well. Dovidio, Evans, and Tyler (1986) found that supraliminal activation of a social category (elderly) led to enhanced accessibility of associated stereotypes (slow or forgetful). A few years later, Devine (1989) extended these effects by showing that subliminal category activation led to stereotype activation as well. After Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) demonstrated that supraliminal words were automatically evaluated, Greenwald and colleagues (Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989; Greenwald, Klinger, & Shuh, 1995) obtained evidence for the automatic evaluation of subliminally presented stimuli. Bargh, Dijksterhuis, and colleagues (e.g., Bargh et al., 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998; Dijksterhuis, Spears, et al., 1998; see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001, for a review) found evidence that both subliminally and supraliminally activated traits and stereotypes affect overt behavior. They even compared supraliminal and subliminal activation while using the same stereotype and the same behavioral measure. Dijksterhuis, Bargh, and Miedema (2000) demonstrated that having participants answer questions about elderly people for a few minutes made participants forgetful, whereas Dijksterhuis, Aarts, et al. (2000) showed that subliminally ashing words related to the stereotype of the elderly reduced memory performance in the same way. In all these cases, activation of a mental representation drove the effects, irrespective of whether this representation was activated supraliminally or subliminally. We concede, however, that there are a few exceptions in which awareness is crucial (see Bargh, 1992). Importantly, stimuli we are consciously aware of can elicit control strategiesoften aimed at counteracting the inuence of the stimulusthat will not be evoked when stimuli are perceived without awareness. What is critical in such cases is that people are aware of how a stimulus may inuence their judgments or behavior. If people are not aware of such inuence, or if people do not know how a stimulus might inuence them, these control processes are not used (see Bargh, 1989, 1992). Still, under some conditions, conscious awareness of a stimulus does elicit processes aimed at controlling the inuence of this stimulus. When sensitive material is activatedsuch as racial stereotypesparticipants may be motivated to suppress the inuence of the activated stereotypes (e.g., Monteith, Devine, & Sherman, 1998). Notwithstanding a few diverging cases, we believe that in the vast majority of cases supraliminal exposure and subliminal exposure have the same effects. This, then, has important consequences for subliminal persuasion and other applications of subliminal presentation techniques.The Power of the Subliminal 87

Using and Abusing Subliminal Stimulation

In this section, we discuss applications of subliminal stimulation. Our aim is to give an objective account of the possibilities and impossibilities of intentionally inuencing peoples behavior with subliminal presentation techniques. Old evidence is discussed and some recent evidence is presented. Furthermore, based on our assumption that activation of mental representations is crucial (often) irrespective of the way they are activated, we occasionally extrapolate from ndings obtained with supraliminal presentation techniques. We differentiate between three different applications. First, people have attempted to change attitudes through evaluative conditioning techniques. Such methods have been used to change attitudes toward both people and objects. Second, rather than affecting behavior through changing their attitudes, people have tried to directly inuence consumer behavior. Third, people have tried to design devices that convey subliminal messages aimed at affecting peoples health.

Changing AttitudesIn September 2000, U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush was accused of employing dubious campaigning techniques. One of the television ads Bush broadcast during his campaign used near-subliminal evaluative conditioning techniques. In this ad, the face of his Democratic opponent Al Gore appeared, while pieces of the words bureaucrats and democrats were ashed on the screen repeatedly. At one point, the face of Al Gore appeared on the screen, while simultaneously the word RATS was presented. The word appeared in the center of the screen, covering the entire screen, for one thirtieth of a second. Since it could be consciously detected by paying very close attention, presentation of the word was not subliminal (or, as Bush would have it, subliminable [Bruni, 2000]). Still, it was presented so briey that it presumably escaped conscious detection among the vast majority of viewers. For scientists, the interesting question is whether such a technique works. Can we pair a person with a subliminally presented (pretending that Bushs people had done a proper job) extremely negative word and change peoples attitude toward this person? Can such a technique even inuence actual voting behavior? Or can peoples attitudes toward a product be enhanced by pairing presentation of this product with a subliminally presented positive stimulus? Will people actually buy it? Razran (1940) was the rst to use evaluative conditioning techniques to inuence attitudes. He reasoned that by pairing presentation of an object (from now on referred to as CS, or its plural, CSi) with presentation of a negatively or positively valenced stimulus (US, USi), this object would eventu88 Basic Mechanisms

ally acquire the same negative or positive experienced valence. Razrans method was simultaneously crude and ecologically appealing. Participants were presented with slogans and had to indicate whether they agreed with each slogan or not. Some participants were presented with the statements while they enjoyed a free lunch, while others were presented with the slogans while inhaling unpleasant odors. When Razran measured agreement with the statements on a later occasion, participants agreed more with the statements if they were rst presented during lunch than if they were rst presented while participants inhaled the odors. Later, Staats, Staats, and colleagues (Staats & Staats, 1957, 1958; Staats, Staats, & Crawford, 1962) investigated evaluative conditioning under more controlled circumstances. They paired words (sometimes nonsense words) with various valenced stimuli, ranging from positive or negative words to electric shocks or annoying sounds. Attitudes toward the words were consistently affected by their evaluative conditioning techniques: words paired with positive stimuli were rated as more positive, whereas words paired with negative stimuli were rated as more negative. Staats and Staats also proposed that the effect was not dependent on participants being consciously aware of the contingency between paired stimuli (CS-US). But is that true? Though the phenomenon of evaluative conditioning itself has been demonstrated numerous times (see De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001, for a review), the question of contingency awareness is still a topic of debate. While most maintain that contingency awareness is not necessary (De Houwer, Hendrickx, & Baeyens, 1997; Hammerl & Grabitz, 1993; Krosnick, Betz, Jussim, & Lynn, 1992; Olson & Fazio, 2001), others are still not convinced (Davey, 1993; Field, 2000). For the present purposes, however, we can go one step further: Is it possible to demonstrate evaluative conditioning with subliminally presented positive or negative USi? If this is true, the contingency awareness question is solved, as one cannot be aware of a contingency between a CS and a US without being rst aware of the existence of a US. Indeed, there is evidence for subliminal evaluative conditioning. Krosnick and colleagues (1992) presented their participants with nine slides of a target person engaging in routine daily activities. These slides were preceded by slides of positive or negative events (e.g., a child with a Mickey Mouse doll versus a bloody shark) presented for 13 ms. Later, participants were asked to assess their evaluation of the target person. A target person paired with positive stimuli was evaluated more positively in general and was rated as having a nicer personality than a target person paired with negative stimuli. These ndings were replicated in a second experiment. Other researchers have also found evidence for subliminal evaluative conditioning (De Houwer, Baeyens, & Eelen, 1994; De Houwer et al., 1997; Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Niedenthal, 1990).The Power of the Subliminal 89

In light of all the evidence, we may safely conclude that attitudes can be changed (or formed) by subliminal evaluative conditioning. This does not imply, of course, that commercial or political use of subliminal evaluative conditioning will have any success. Most potential applications of subliminal evaluative conditioning differ from published research in two ways. First, Al Gore, McDonalds, or Coca-Cola are stimuli people are already familiar with. Second, people already have existing positive or negative attitudes toward such stimuli. In other words, the stimuli of import for applied purposes are not neutral (at least not for the vast majority of people). While the role of familiarity has received some attention in past research, as far as we know prior attitudes have never been taken into account. In fact, most published research on evaluative conditioning has used only neutral stimuli as CSi. One may expect that people with neutral and/or weak attitudes are easier to inuence than people with strong and/or extreme attitudes, but this matter awaits scrutiny. The potential moderating role of familiarity has been investigated in the supraliminal evaluative conditioning domain. Shimp, Stuart, and Engle (1991; see also Stuart, Shimp, & Engle, 1987) used both well-known brands (CocaCola and Pepsi) and new brands in their evaluative conditioning research. In their experiments, they paired these brand names with pleasant and unpleasant pictures. The attitudinal effects of evaluative conditioning were more pronounced for unfamiliar than for familiar stimuli, but even attitudes toward familiar stimuli were inuenced. Cacioppo, Marshall-Goodell, Tassinary, and Petty (1992) obtained similar ndings, again with supraliminal evaluative conditioning. They presented people with both words (i.e., familiar stimuli) and nonwords (i.e., unfamiliar stimuli) paired with mild electric shocks. Whereas the attitudes toward nonwords were affected to a greater extent than attitudes toward words, attitudes toward words were affected as well. In sum, there is some converging evidence for the moderating effect of familiarity: attitudes toward familiar stimuli can be changed with evaluative conditioning, but attitude change is more pronounced when stimuli are novel. For practical applications, important parameters of evaluative conditioning are the relation between frequency of CS-US pairing and the size of the effect, as well as the decay function of these effects. After all, advertisers need to know whether only couch potatoes who watch hours of television (and thus television advertisements) will be affected by their subliminal messages, and if these effects will dissipate before their viewers ever step inside a store (or into a voting booth). The Bush campaign showed their almost-subliminal ad about 4,000 times (Berke, 2000). Intuitively, it makes sense to opt for a high frequency of CS-US pairings, but this idea is only partly supported by research ndings. Comparing conditions of 1, 3, 10, and 20 supraliminally presented pairings, Stuart and colleagues (1987) concluded that higher frequencies led to greater effects, but also that the effect of frequency was weak.90 Basic Mechanisms

Finally, Baeyens and colleagues (Baeyens, Crombez, van den Bergh, & Eelen, 1988; Baeyens, Eelen, Crombez, & van den Bergh, 1992) also compared different frequencies of supraliminally presented CS-US pairings and found that up to at least 10 pairings, higher frequencies led to greater effects. Beyond this point, however, they suggest that there may actually be an inverse relation between frequency and effect size. In sum, one maywith some care conclude that for low frequencies there seems to be a weak but positive relation between frequency and effect size, while the relation for higher frequencies is unclear at this point. The relevant ndings concerning the decay or extinction of evaluative conditioning effects are quite spectacular. Baeyens and colleagues (1988) supraliminally paired neutral faces with liked or disliked faces and showed that attitudes toward the neutral faces paired with liked pictures were more positive than attitudes toward neutral faces paired with disliked stimuli. Two months later, when participants evaluated the same conditioned pictures again, there was no sign of decay: the difference in liking between the neutral faces paired with liked pictures and the neutral faces paired with disliked pictures was still highly signicant. Levey and Martin (1975) reported even more impressive ndings: their effects of evaluative conditioning were still reliable after 18 months. Can we conclude, on the basis of the current evidence, that subliminal evaluative conditioning can have effects when it is applied for political or commercial reasons? It is true that subliminal evaluative conditioning has been shown to work. It is also true that effects of evaluative conditioning do not decay quickly. Finally, both familiar and unfamiliar targets can be conditioned, although attitudes toward the latter are easier to manipulate. Hence, though we do not yet know whether prior attitudes (and the strength and extremity of these attitudes) moderate effects of evaluative conditioning, it is possible that advertisers or politicians could subliminally shape or change our attitudes toward a new toothpaste, McDonalds, or Al Gore. An important disclaimer is that evaluative conditioning affects attitudes but not necessarily behavior. Someone may be able to subliminally inuence our attitude toward a new toothpaste or even toward Al Gore, but that does not yet imply that they also affect what toothpaste we buy or which presidential candidate we vote for. The factors that inuence the relation between attitudes and behavior are too numerous to discuss here, but some assumptions can be made regarding the relation between attitudes inuenced by evaluative conditioning and actual behavior. Cacioppo and colleagues (1992) reasoned that attitudes based on evaluative conditioning could determine less rational and impulsive behavior, while they could not (or could hardly) affect more deliberate, intention-driven behavior. This idea is supported by other contributions in the attitude literature. Evaluative conditioning creates attitudes that can be activated automatically upon perception of the attitudeThe Power of the Subliminal 91

object (Olson & Fazio, 2001). According to Fazios (1990; see also Fazio et al., 1986) MODE model, attitudes that are automatically activated upon perception of the attitude object affect overt behavior in the absence of more motivated and elaborate issue-relevant thinking and have far smaller effects when people engage in signicant deliberation. Roughly speaking, the more we think about a behavior, the less inuence prior evaluative conditioning should have on this behavior. Hence, with subliminal evaluative conditioning it may well be possible to exert some inuence over the toothpaste people buy. However, it is likely to be much harder to inuence a house purchase, at least for people who deliberate about such things. As for a decision such as a vote for a presidential candidate, it seems highly doubtful that evaluative conditioning could exert much inuence. Given the current evidence, though, it is premature to give denite answers or to rule out any possibilities.

Changing Consumer Behavior

The single most controversial area within the domain of subliminal psychological processes is subliminal persuasion: the direct inuence of consumer behavior by subliminal directives. As alluded to before, this idea can be traced to a newspaper publication about James Vicary, who claimed that he had greatly increased the sales of popcorn and cola in a New Jersey cinema by subliminally ashing Eat Popcorn and Drink Coke during a movie. This newspaper article caused a tremendous stir: Moore (1982), who published a very insightful review of the area, quotes The Nation as stating that it is the most alarming and outrageous discovery since Mr. Gatling invented his gun (p. 206). Although Vicary later admitted he never found any evidence for subliminally inuencing behavior, the majority of people outside academia believe in the potential power of subliminal messages. This is partly because Vicarys original claim was noticed by many, while his later erratum was noted by very few (Pratkanis, 1992). Another reason for this beliefs persistence is that people have made grandiose yet largely unsubstantiated claims about both the effectiveness and pervasiveness of subliminal persuasion (e.g., Key, 1989), whereas the skeptics have published their work in scientic articles that are obviously less accessible to people outside the scientic community. Still, many people believe in the power of subliminal persuasion: Rogers and Smith (1993) found that 75% of Americans had heard of subliminal persuasion and of these 75%, another 75% believed it worked (see Zanot, Pincus, & Lamp, 1983, for comparable gures). Can we, on the basis of the current scientic evidence, draw any conclusions regarding the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion techniques? Despite quite a number of publications, this is surprisingly difcult. To explain why the popular belief in subliminal persuasion is strong, Pratkanis (1992) char92 Basic Mechanisms

acterized the study of subliminal persuasion as a form of cargo cult science (see Feynman, 1985). A cargo cult science has all the trappings of science the illusion of objectivity, the appearance of careful study, and the motions of an experimentbut lacks one important ingredient: skepticism (Pratkanis, 1992, p. 264). This is without doubt true: Many claims have been made on the basis of the imsiest of evidence (e.g., Key, 1989). However, to objectively assess whether subliminal persuasion can work, one has to deal with a second problem: the science devoted to showing that subliminal persuasion does not work can just as well be characterized as a cargo cult science. Because many scientists simply do not want subliminal persuasion to work, rather unusual practices can be witnessed in the literature. It may be the only area in psychology where greater value and credibility are attached to null results than to actual signicant results, and where it is so easy to publish noneffects. Furthermore, effects that are obtained are often downplayed by the authors themselves because they did not want to nd them (e.g., Trappey, 1996). In addition, scientists often advise their colleagues not to investigate the topic (see, e.g., Packard, 1978; Pratkanis, 1992) and many have used rather extreme and often suggestive language in their publications (see also the rst paragraph of this chapter). Pratkanis (1992) said, Of course, as with anything scientic, it may be that someday, somehow, someone will develop a subliminal technique that may work, just as someday a chemist may nd a way to transmute lead into gold (p. 269). But let us return to the important question. Can it work? Should we buy lead futures? If we want to assess whether subliminal persuasion could ever work, it may be useful to differentiate between three distinct psychological processes that may be inuenced. First, can we make people hungry or thirsty by subliminal messages? That is, can we alter peoples basic physiological needs or the subjective experience of these needs? Second, can we change peoples behavior itself? Can we make them drink or eat more? Finally, can we affect peoples choices? Given that people want to drink, can we get them to choose one brand over another through subliminal messages? We discuss these issues in three sections. Thirst and Hunger One way to subliminally inuence peoples behavior is to make them hungry or thirsty. Byrne (1959) was the rst to test this idea. In his experiment, he ashed the word beef repeatedly (140 times) during a 16minute movie. Importantly, Byrne (1959) ensured that people were not aware of the subliminally presented word. Compared to a control group, subliminal presentation of the word had no semantic effects and no effect on peoples preference for a beef sandwich over alternatives, but it did affect subjective ratings of hunger. A few years later, Spence (1964; see also Spence & Ehrenberg, 1964) replicated Byrnes (1959) ndings. He presented participants with words on aThe Power of the Subliminal 93

screen. Between these words, Spence (1964) subliminally ashed the word cheese. After exposure to these words, participants were asked whether their hunger had increased, decreased, or remained the same as it was before the experiment. Of his 35 participants, 24 reported increased hunger, 9 reported decreased hunger, and 2 reported no change, a reliable effect. One may object here that experimenter demands are looming large, but this effect occurred only after 30 stimulus exposures and not after 5 stimulus exposures. An alternative explanation in terms of demand characteristics would have to explain why demands did not exert an effect in a condition that differed only in frequency of exposure. Hawkins (1970) ashed either Coke or Drink Coke for 2.7 ms intervals during the presentation of unrelated supraliminal material. In a third, control group, participants were subliminally exposed to nonsense syllables. As expected, subjective thirst ratings were higher for both experimental groups than for the control group. Although the difference between the Drink Coke and the control group did not reach conventional levels of signicance (p < .06), the difference between the Coke and the control condition was signicant (p < .022). One common objection is that there have been a few known failures to replicate these experiments (see e.g., Moore, 1982). Although this is important, these three experiments are themselves replications of the same phenomenon: Subliminally ashing words designating food or drinks can increase subjective hunger or thirst. Hence, simply concluding that subliminal manipulations of hunger or thirst cannot work is premature. However, the relation between subjectively felt needs such as hunger or thirst and actual consumer behavior is complex and presumably rather weak. As Moore (1982, p. 42) concluded, even if the results are taken at face value, their relevance to advertising is minimal. Drinking and Eating A second question is whether we can subliminally elicit drinking or eating behavior. Earlier work has already shown that subliminally activated personality traits or stereotypes can affect overt behavior (see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001, for a review). Importantly, the effects of activated stereotypes and traits on overt behavior are mediated by the activation of behavior representations. For instance, activation of the stereotype of professors or the trait intelligence leads to activation of behavior representations such as concentrate or think, which in turn affect actual performance on an intellectual task. Given that behavior is inuenced by activation of behavior representations such as think, one can hypothesize that the same can be expected from activation of a representation of, for instance, drink. We (Dijksterhuis, Wegner, & Aarts, 2001) tested this idea. Participants performed a standard lexical decision task. In total, participants were pre-

94 Basic Mechanisms

sented with 20 letter strings, either random letter strings or mundane, short words (e.g., door, bike). However, prior to the presentation of the words, other, subliminal words were ashed. In one condition, we ashed the word drink, in another condition we ashed the word cola, and in the control condition, we presented a four-letter random letter string. These words were ashed for 15 ms and were immediately masked by the target word. Importantly, when asked, none of the participants reported seeing anything prior to the target words. After participants nished the lexical decision task, the experimenter, who was blind to condition, announced the second task would be rather long and said, I am going to have a drink. Do you want a drink as well? We have cola and mineral water. Participants who indicated they wanted a drink (the majority) were given the appropriate can. They then read text from the computer screen before the experimenter said the experiment was over. Both people in the drink prime condition (M = 80 cc) and people in the cola prime condition (M = 96 cc) drank more than people in the control condition (M = 33 cc). At the same time, however, the cola prime did not affect participants choice of beverage. Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna (2002) also obtained evidence for subliminally inuencing drinking behavior. Participants in their experiment were asked not to eat or drink anything for 3 hours before the experimental session to make sure participants would arrive at the lab thirsty. Subsequently, participants were asked to taste cookies. Afterward, some participants were given a glass of water, allegedly to cleanse their palate. Hence, some participants were kept thirsty, whereas others were allowed to quench their thirst. Participants were then subliminally primed. In one condition, participants were subliminally presented with words associated with thirst (e.g., thirst, dry), whereas in the control condition they were presented with words unrelated to thirst. After this task, participants performed another taste test. They were asked to evaluate two beverages and were told they could drink as much as they wanted. Participants who had been presented with the thirst-related words drank signicantly more than the control participants. One may argue that advertisers are interested not so much in how much people drink but instead in what people drink. However, more drinking in general implies that people will also drink more of a particular drink. After all, in bars guests are often given salty food (such as peanuts) for free to get them to drink more. This is benecial for both the owner of the bar and the manufacturer of a particular drink. Finally, it should also be noted that the size of both effects discussed here is considerable. Choice The third question is whether one can inuence the consumer choices people make via subliminal messages. Can we get people to choose Coca-Cola over Pepsi? A substantial literature in the advertising and marketing domain

The Power of the Subliminal 95

is devoted to this question. In his review of this domain, Trappey (1996) listed previous narrative reviews. Out of nine earlier reviews (some covering more than choice behavior), ve concluded that subliminal messages could affect behavior, whereas four concluded that there was no evidence for such effects. Based on his own meta-analytic review, he concluded that subliminal messages do have an effect on choice. However, he seemed to regret this, as he spent the better part of his discussion downplaying the importance of the effect. The combined effect size he reported is indeed small (r = .06), and Trappey said that it falls between the effect of aspirin on heart attacks and the relationship between alcohol abuse and a tour of duty in Vietnam (p. 527) and later concluded that it is negligible (p. 528). But is this effect really that small? An r of .06 means that if without treatment 50 out of 100 people choose a certain product, after treatment 53 people would do so. Psychologically such an effect is small, but advertisers may have a different opinion. For multinational corporations, such a small effect correspondsin theory at leastto millions of dollars. Moreover, one might wonder if supraliminal advertising techniques might perform better. Actually, a closer look reveals that it is very surprising that Trappey found an effect at all. In 17 out of the 23 experiments in the meta-analysis, the subliminal message was only presented once. It is a well-known fact that more frequent presentation of a message leads to greater psychological effects (e.g., Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998; Higgins, Bargh & Lombardi, 1985; Marcel, 1983; Srull & Wyer, 1979, 1980). Strahan and colleagues (2002) showed that subliminally inuencing choices may work better in combination with supraliminal information among people who already have a relevant need. They invited thirsty participants to the laboratory. Some participants were presented with subliminally presented words related to thirst or with control words. Subsequently, participants were offered two drinks, Super Quencher and Power Pro. Super Quencher was advertised as the best thirst-quencing beverage on the market, while Power Pro was not so advertised. Interestingly, participants who had not been presented with the thirst-related words indicated no preference, despite the fact that they were thirsty, whereas participants who had been presented with the thirst-related words had a clear preference for Super Quencher. In other words, if one is already thirsty, a relevant advertisement can be more convincing if it is accompanied by subliminal messages. Importantly, Strahan and colleagues replicated this effect a number of times. Now where do all these results leave us? It seems to be possible to subliminally inuence peoples self-reported thirst or hunger. It seems to be possible to subliminally affect the amount people consume. Finally, it may be possible to subliminally affect choices. On the one hand, it is certainly premature to claim that subliminal advertising does work and that we should seri-

96 Basic Mechanisms

ously think about guarding ourselves against it. On the other hand, the evidence is denitely strong enough to say that commercial applications of subliminal stimulation can, in principle, work, and that we should not treat them as a myth unworthy of investigation. Instead, we should study applications of subliminal stimulation to come to an objective appreciation of exactly what is, and what is not, possible. The least we should conclude is that the possibility that one or another form of subliminal advertising will be shown to have an effect is much greater than the possibility that people will learn to turn lead into gold. And if not, it really is time to buy a lot of lead.

Improving HealthVarious companies have abused the popular belief in the power of subliminal phenomena by marketing subliminal self-help devices. For instance, customers can buy audiotapes in which subliminal messages are hidden. Supposedly, by processing subliminal messages such as I feel fantastic this morning or Lets stay away from the pizza in the refrigerator today, people will feel better or lose weight. During the 1980s, self-help audiotapes were so popular in the United States that various scientists were prompted to test their effectiveness. For example, Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pratkanis, and Eskenazi (1991) tested the effects of two tapes, one designed to improve memory and the other designed to improve self-esteem. Greenwald and colleagues switched some of the labels on the tapes before handing them to their participants. The participants listened to the tapes each day for a 1-month period, and both before and after this period, self-esteem and memory performance were assessed. The results were clear: All that was found was a placebo effect. The labels on the tapes had an effect, but the subliminal messages on the tapes did not. At about the same time, various other researchers tested self-help tapes (e.g., Russell, Rowe, & Smouse, 1991) and reached the same conclusion: Subliminal selfhelp messages do not have any effect at all.5 Does this mean that physical or mental health cannot benet from the processing of subliminal stimuli? That conclusion is premature, because these experiments all investigated auditory subliminal perception. Visual subliminal perception may be generally more effective than auditory subliminal perception. Both Mayer and Merkelbach (1999) and Theus (1994) have remarked that the probability that subliminal stimuli are cognitively processed is much higher for visual than for auditory stimuli. This may be partly caused by the difference between the human processing capacity for visual versus auditory stimuli.

The Power of the Subliminal 97

Recently, various companies have advertised self-help devices that use visual subliminal stimuli. When connected to a VCR, such a device presents subliminal messages on a TV screen. Customers may lose weight, reduce stress, and improve self-esteem while they watch the Superbowl or Oprah. We do not know whether these devices have been scientically tested. Though visual subliminal stimulation is more likely to be effective than auditory stimulation, we should not yet be optimistic. One device (made by a company called Motivision) presents subliminal messages that are rather long (2040 letters). Greenwald (1992; see also Abrams & Greenwald, 2000; but see Silverman, 1976) has already showed that subliminally presenting anything more than a single word is a hazardous affair, whereas short sentences are unlikely to have any effect at all. Assuming that people can pick up bits and pieces of a sentence, the subliminal presentation of a sentence such as Do not eat much can have various consequences. Unfortunately, the probability that it urges people to eat more (when only eat or eat much are perceived) is higher than the probability that it urges people to eat less (for which the entire sentence is needed). But what if we subliminally present single words? Recently, Dijksterhuis (2001) started to test the idea that subliminal exposure to stimuli related to relaxation may affect cardiovascular activity. It has often been demonstrated that consciously thinking or imagining relaxation can have a profound impact on autonomic processes such as heart rate (Jones & Johnson, 1980; Lucini et al., 1997), respiration rate (Jones & Johnson, 1980), and skin resistance (Himle, 1973). In our view, the critical mediator causing these changes in autonomic functioning is not the conscious imagination but rather the activation of the mental representation of relaxation. In our experiment, participants were asked to watch a computer screen during three 1-minute task periods. These periods were separated by 1-minute breaks. During the second task period, participants were subliminally presented with either the word rest or relax every 3 s. The words remained on the screen for only 15 ms and were both premasked and postmasked by random letter strings. The rst and third task periods, during which only the pre- and postmasks appeared, were used as controls. Heart rate was measured throughout these three task periods. Heart rate was indeed signicantly lower (M = 70.3 bpm) during the experimental 1-minute period relative to the two control periods (M = 72.1 bpm). Subliminal stimulation, then, indeed affects cardiovascular activity. At about the same time, Hull, Slone, and Matthews (2001) obtained comparable results in two different experiments. They subliminally presented participants (17 ms) with words such as angry or relax. Immediately afterward, systolic and diastolic blood pressure was lower for the participants presented with the word relax than for participants presented with the word angry. Of course, these ndings should not be taken as evidence that we can now design self-help devices to reduce stress. The effects obtained in the cited stud98 Basic Mechanisms

ies decay quickly and the effects are small in size. Still, they are enough reason to take the idea seriously and to continue to investigate effects of subliminal stimulation on health.

Conclusion: Three Good Reasons for Investigating Subliminal Phenomena

In closing, we would like to give three good reasons for taking the domain seriously and for doing scientic research on subliminal phenomena. The rst reason regards the potential benecial use of subliminal stimulation. Self-help tapes have been proven to be ineffective, but it seems worthwhile to continue to study other possibilities. The studies demonstrating that heart rate and blood pressure can be temporarily decreased by subliminal stimulation provide enough evidence to give the idea of subliminal stimulation to promote health another chance. The second reason regards the abuse of subliminal stimulation. The idea of subliminal inuence has met with strong aversion. People do not want to be subliminally steered toward buying toothpaste X and certainly not toward voting for a particular political candidate. Nobody wants to pay $200 for some ineffective health-improving device. However, we should be aware that subliminal techniques are applied and sold, and we can act to decrease or maybe even stop this abuse. One way would be legislation. Another way would be to objectively inform society about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of certain techniques. Importantly, whatever we choose, it is necessary to rst come to know what is possible and what is not. The third reason is purely scientic. If, in a certain area, a few ndings have been documented and a few articles have been published, this usually leads more people to investigate these ndings. Researchers abandon a domain for a limited number of reasons: They know everything they want to know; they conclude it does not lead to something substantial; or they simply stop being fascinated by a certain topic. None of these reasons is relevant to the application of subliminal stimulation. We do not know much yet; we cannot say that it does not lead to something; and many people are fascinated by ndings such as the ones presented in this chapter. Instead, the reason that so little research has been done is emotional. Vicary and others (e.g., Key, 1989) have inuenced popular beliefs about subliminal research based on shoddy research. In reaction, the vast majority of the psychological community has claimed that subliminal persuasion cannot work and that we should remove it from the agenda. This, however, is simply unscientic. If, as scientists, we base our statements on things other than sound research, science itself will become superuous.The Power of the Subliminal 99

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Tony Greenwald and the editors for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes1. Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, and Tataryn (1992) point out that the Peirce and Jastrow studies were not just the rst experiments on subliminal perception, but also the rst American psychological experiments: These were the rst studies conducted at Hopkins, the rst psychological laboratory in America. 2. We concede that we cannot guarantee that all experiments cited in this chapter do indeed t this denition. An awareness check is needed to rule out the possibility that participants could perceive stimuli consciously. While most authors report such a check, a few (mainly in older articles) do not. 3. Of course, at any point in time it is not the case that our total processing capacity is aimed at one target (such as judging an apartment). But even if one assumes that only a small part of the overall processing capacity was devoted to judging the apartment, it is likely that far more relevant information was dealt with unconsciously than consciously. 4. Although subliminally presented words can be classied on the basis of their valence, Abrams and Greenwald (2000) demonstrated that under some circumstances subliminal perception leads to processing only word parts. For instance, repeated exposure to the negative words smut and bile leads to a negative evaluation of the subliminally presented word smile. In other words, rather than processing smile as a whole, participants processed the word parts sm and ile that were both evaluated negatively due to earlier exposure to smut and bile. These results should not be taken as evidence that people can only process word parts subliminally, as such a conclusion is at odds with much other research. Rather, these results show that under some circumstances word parts are given more weight during processing of subliminal stimuli than entire words. 5. At about the same time, religious fanatics accused the rock band Judas Priest of hiding subliminal messages (actually, backward messages) in their music that supposedly caused the suicide of a 10-year-old boy. As one might expect, people cannot make sense of backward speech. Begg, Needham, and Bookbinder (1993; see also Vokey & Read, 1985) have shown that people cannot differentiate between backward nursery rhymes, Christian messages, Satanic messages, or pornography. This should not be taken as evidence that subliminal self-help tapes cannot have an effect. The tapes that were tested were designed for commercial use by people who did not quite know what they were doing (other than trying to make money). They certainly knew much less about subliminal inuence than most, if not all, of the people cited in this chapter.

106 Basic Mechanisms

Similarity in Cognitive Processing

Similarity is a compelling part of everyday experience. In the visual world, objects that are similar in shape or color may seem to leap to our attention. In conceptual processing, we have an immediate sense of whether a pair of concepts is similar. The prominence of similarity in conscious experience has made it an important explanatory construct in psychological theories. New problems are assumed to be solved on the basis of their similarity to known problems (e.g., Reed, Ernst, & Banerji, 1974; Ross, 1987). Objects are assumed to be classied on the basis of their similarity to some stored category representation (e.g., Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Reed, 1972). Predictions of new features of an item may be based on what other similar items have those features (e.g., Blok & Gentner, 2000; Heit & Rubinstein, 1994; Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez, & Shar, 1990; Sloman, 1993). Yet despite extensive work on mechanisms of similarity, there has been very little discussion of why and how similarity is important in cognitive processing beyond the general recognition that similarity often provides a good basis for generalization (Shepard, 1987). In this chapter, we consider the role of similarity in the cognitive architecture and the relationship of similarity to automatic processing. We suggest that some types of similarity are determined automatically. When the cognitive system recognizes similarities, they inuence cognitive processing, even when the person does not intend processing to be affected by similarities. To support this claim, we rst outline three approaches to similarity. Then, we examine how similarity can inuence both low-level processes like attention and memory retrieval and higher cognitive processes like analogical reasoning and decision making. Next, we explore a number of examples in which cognitive processing is in107

uenced by the presence of similarities in a stimulus set. Finally, we broaden the discussion to include similarities in more deliberate cognitive processes.

Three Approaches to Similarity Representation and Similarity

When a person makes a similarity comparison, the result is typically both a judgment of similarity and also some awareness of the commonalities and differences of the pair compared. A model of similarity must account for both of these outputs. How it does so is bound up with proposals about mental representation. Similarity processing involves the comparison of two representations. Thus the selection of a formalism for representation in a model of similarity inuences not only the complexity and computational resources required but also the nature of the output. In this section, we start by discussing similarity models that assume spatial representations. These models are fairly simple in both their output and their processing requirements. Then, we turn to more complex featural and structural models of representation and the comparison processes that operate over them. In the next section, we examine the implications of these models for the cognitive architecture. The spatial view of similarity is embodied in multidimensional scaling models of similarity, as well as in distributed connectionist models and highdimensional semantic space models (e.g., Gardenfors, 2000; see Gentner & Markman, 1995; Markman, 1999; Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993, for discussion). According to spatial models, concepts are represented as points or vectors in a semantic space (e.g., Shepard, 1962). Calculating similarity involves nding the distance between points or vectors using some metric. These models have the important advantage that nding distance in a space is a computationally simple calculation. Thus, similarity comparisons do not require signicant processing resources. However, spatial models have two major disadvantages as psychological models. First, the comparison process gives rise only to a distance between concepts. This scalar value can be used to model similarity judgments, but there is no way to access the specic commonalities and differences that form the basis of the similarity judgment. Second, similarity in a space is inuenced only by the differences between concepts, not by their similarities. Adding dimensions to the space along which two concepts are the same will not increase similarity, but adding dimensions on which two concepts differ will decrease similarity (Tversky, 1977). Thus, spatial representations cannot capture Tverskys (1977) nding that the same pair (e.g., U.S.A./Canada) can be both more similar to and more different from each other than another pair (e.g., Venezuela/Bolivia).108 Basic Mechanisms

While spatial models of similarity have been used to model many similarity phenomena (see Shoben, 1983, for a review), the above limitations, along with others catalogued by Tversky (1977), make spatial models problematic as a general theory of similarity (but see Krumhansl, 1978; Nosofsky, 1986, for attempts to address some of the shortcomings of spatial models). Spatial models yield only a scalar measure of similarity, and only differences inuence the calculation of similarity. Thus, they fail to capture the fact that people are able to access the commonalities and differences of pairs in addition to rating their similarity; and similarity judgments are, if anything, more inuenced by the pairs commonalities than by its differences (Markman & Gentner, 1993b; Tversky, 1977). In response to these shortcomings, Tversky (1977) proposed a featural approach to similarity called the contrast model. According to the contrast model, concepts are represented by sets of features. Pairs of feature sets can be compared using elementary set operations. Features in the intersection of the sets are commonalities of a pair, and features not in the intersection are differences. Rated similarity increases with the commonalities of a pair and decreases with the differences. Thus, this model is able to calculate a scalar rating of similarity that is inuenced by both commonalities and differences, but it also permits access to the particular commonalities and differences of a pair. As in spatial models, the calculation of similarity in featural models is computationally inexpensive, as each feature in the representation of one item simply needs to be matched against the set of features representing the other item. A third approach to similarity was developed to account for phenomena that demonstrate the importance of relations in similarity (Gentner, 1983; Gentner & Markman, 1997; Markman & Gentner, 1993b; Goldstone, Medin, & Gentner, 1991). For example, gure 5.1(a) depicts two simple geometric congurations. These congurations could be viewed as being similar because there is a circle and a square in each or because there is one gure above another in each. On a featural representation like the one in gure 5.1(b), it is not clear how to match up the features in the two lists. Indeed, the rst seven features in each feature list are the same; they are simply listed in a different order. When the intersection of these feature sets is taken as in Tverskys (1977) contrast model, the features are matched without regard to the way they are ordered. While it might be possible to add congural features such as square-above-circle to this list in order to account for the way objects are attached to relations, the number of congural features required as new relations are added quickly becomes unwieldy (Foss & Harwood, 1975; Markman & Gentner, 2000). Structured representations, like the ones in the graphs in gure 5.1(c), are useful for dealing with relations. These representations consist of entities, attributes, and relations. Entities such as Square 1 stand for the objects in aNonintentional Similarity Processing 109

Figure 5.1 (a) A geometric configuration used as an example of information that is available in similarity comparisons; (b) a simple feature list describing these configurations; (c) a graph of structured representations that describe the configurations. The ovals in the graph are relations; the bold rectangles are attributes; and the light rectangles are entities.

domain. Attributes [e.g., shaded(x)] represent descriptive properties (e.g., the property of being shaded). Attributes take one argument (in this case, x), which binds the attribute to a particular object. For example, shaded (Square 1) means that Square 1 is shaded. Relations like above(x,y) are representational elements that relate two or more arguments. The arguments to a rela110 Basic Mechanisms

tion may be objects, attributes, or other relationsthat is, relations that take other relations as arguments. Higher-order relations are particularly important, because they often capture system-level connections within a domain such as causal and functional relations and implications. Comparing pairs of relational representations like the ones depicted in gure 5.1(c) involves a process of structural alignmentpart of the structuremapping process that is proposed as the basis of analogical comparisons (Falkenhainer, Forbus, & Gentner, 1989; Keane, Ledgeway, & Duff, 1994; Gentner, 1983, 1989; Gentner & Markman, 1997). On this view, the comparison process seeks a structurally consistent match between two domains. First, the comparison process nds identical attributes and relations in each domain. For example, there are above(x,y) relations in the two representations shown in gure 5.1(c). Potential matches are examined to ensure that they are structurally consistent. Structural consistency comprises the constraints of parallel connectivity and one-to-one mapping. Parallel connectivity says that if an attribute or relation in each domain is placed in correspondence, then their arguments must also match. For example, if the above(x,y) relations are placed in correspondence, then the rst arguments to that relation (i.e., the things on top) must be matched, as must the second arguments (i.e., the things on the bottom). One-to-one mapping requires that each element in one representation match to at most one element in the other. Thus, if the square in the lefthand conguration is matched to the circle on the right because both are on top, then the square on the left cannot also be matched to the square on the right because of their similarity in shape. In cases such as the conguration in gure 5.1(a) in which there is some ambiguity about how the objects should be placed in correspondence, the structural alignment process may yield more than one structurally consistent match (Markman & Gentner, 1993b). The structural alignment process has been implemented in a number of computational models using both symbolic (Falkenhainer et al., 1989; Keane et al., 1994) and connectionist (Holyoak & Thagard, 1989; Hummel & Holyoak, 1997) architectures. The structure-mapping model is much more intensive computationally than spatial or featural models. The calculation of parallel connectivity requires checking each correspondence among relations to ensure that the arguments of those relations also match. In addition, enforcing one-to-one mapping may require a number of comparisons among potential matches.1 The benet of this increased complexity is that structural alignment provides a more adequate model of similarity than the prior models. First, the models assessment of degree of similarity matches the human phenomena. For example, rated similarity tends to increase with the number of commonalities of a pair and to decrease with the number of differences (Markman & Gentner, 1993a). Furthermore, subjective similarity tends to beNonintentional Similarity Processing 111

higher when people focus on relational commonalities than when they focus on object-attribute commonalities (Gentner, Rattermann, & Forbus, 1993; Markman & Gentner, 1993b). This is especially true if the relations form a system governed by common higher order relations (Clement & Gentner, 1991; Gentner et al., 1993). Second, the structure-mapping model provides an account of directionality in similarity that ts human data. Bowdle and Gentner (1997) found that people preferred to see comparisons in the direction from a well-structured, systematic situation to a less well-structured situation. For example, peoples knowledge about a familiar domain is usually better structured than is their knowledge about an unfamiliar domain, which leads to an asymmetry in a comparison, so that people prefer the comparison scanners are copiers to the reverse. Third, structure mapping predicts inferences that follow from a comparison (Clement & Gentner, 1991; Gentner & Markman, 1997). People spontaneously project new information that is connected to the common structure, but which is not yet present in the target. Fourth, this account of similarity makes novel predictions about the types of commonalities and differences that emerge from comparisons. As in featural models, commonalities are matching elements. For example, the left and right representations in gure 5.1(c) might be seen as similar, because there is an above(x,y) relation in each. Unlike other models, structure mapping predicts two kinds of differences that emerge from comparisons. First, elements connected to the common structure may participate in the perception of differences. For example, seeing that one gure is above another in each representation leads to noticing that there is a square on the top in one conguration and a circle on the top in the other. Differences like this that are noticed because of the way the representations were matched are called alignable differences (Markman & Gentner, 1993a). Second, alignable differences can be contrasted with nonalignable differences, which are aspects of one representation that are not connected to the common structure and have no correspondence in the other. For example, the triangle in the right-hand conguration is not part of the above relation and has no correspondence in the other conguration, and thus is a nonalignable difference. The distinction between alignable and nonalignable differences goes beyond what is predicted by featural models. For example, Tverskys (1977) contrast model assumes that the commonalities and differences that emerge from comparisons are independent. The structural alignment approach predicts that alignable differences are fundamentally related to commonalities, though nonalignable differences are not. Considerable evidence has been gathered to support the distinction between alignable and nonalignable differences. This evidence suggests both that alignable differences are related to commonalities and that alignable differ112 Basic Mechanisms

ences tend to be favored over nonalignable differences in comparisons. Two lines of evidence support the relationship between commonalities and differences. First, pairs for which people can list many commonalities are also those for which they can list many alignable differences. Second, alignable differences tend to be conceptually related to commonalities, but nonalignable differences do not (Gentner & Gunn, 2001; Markman & Gentner, 1993a, 1996). Also, a number of demonstrations have shown that alignable differences are more focal (or salient) than nonalignable differences in comparisons. For example, in free property listing tasks, more alignable differences tend to be listed than nonalignable differences (Markman & Gentner, 1993a). People nd it easier to list a difference for similar pairs (which have many alignable differences) than for dissimilar pairs (which have few alignable differences; Gentner & Gunn, 2001; Gentner & Markman, 1994). Further, carrying out a similarity comparison renders differences more available. Finally, following a similarity comparison of a pair of pictures, an object that was an alignable difference serves as a better retrieval cue than does an object that was a nonalignable difference (Markman & Gentner, 1997; Stilwell & Markman, 2001).

Types of Similarity and Their Use

This review of similarity models reveals two critical dimensions along which models differ. First is the expressive power of the models. Spatial models provide a scalar measure of similarity that is inuenced by the similarities or the differences of a pair, but not both. Featural models provide a measure of similarity that is inuenced by both commonalities and differences and that can output independent sets of common and distinctive features. Only the structure-mapping model captures both commonalities and differences, as well as the more precise (and psychologically important) distinction between alignable and nonalignable differences. The model also captures the relation between alignable differences and the commonalities of a pair. Further, it is the only one of the three approaches that provides an account of which inferences will be drawn from a comparison. The second dimension along which models of similarity can be evaluated is computational complexity. The expressive power of structural alignment comes at a computational cost. Ensuring that matching relations in two domains also have matching arguments and that the entire correspondence obeys the constraint of one-to-one mapping is a complex process. In contrast, comparing two points in a multidimensional space and nding correspondences within a set of features are both fairly simple processes to carry out. Thus, the greater complexity of structural alignment requires more time and effort than do the simpler spatial and featural processing models.Nonintentional Similarity Processing 113

It is typical when evaluating research to pick one model as the best one. We want to take a different tack here. As we discuss below, different similarity processes make different tradeoffs with respect to complexity and expressive power. We suggest that there are two modes of similarity processing (Forbus, Gentner, & Law, 1995; Gentner et al., 1993). The rstthe one we have discussed so faris based on structural alignment, provides slower, more effortful judgments, and also yields access to the commonalities and differences (particularly the alignable differences) of a pair. This process is useful in cognitive processes that can be carried out over a period of many seconds (as opposed to milliseconds) or those which involve a small number of comparisons that require access to commonalities and differences. The second is based on the principles embodied in the spatial and featural views, and provides fast judgments of the degree of similarity of a pair, but does not take the structure of the representations into account. This fast process is most useful when judgments are required quickly or when many similarity comparisons must be made in parallel, as when accessing long-term memory. One piece of evidence in favor of this dichotomy comes from research on analogical reminding. Much research suggests that remindings show much less inuence of structure than do analogy comparisons. In one study, Gentner and colleagues (1993) asked people to read a set of stories. For example, one story was about a hawk that gives feathers to a hunter to use in his arrows in exchange for the hunters agreement not to shoot the hawk. A week later, the same people read new stories and were asked to recall any stories from the previous week that were similar to the new story. When given new stories that involved similar characters (e.g., an eagle), people were likely to recall the original story. This reminding happened even when the new story had a very different plot from the original. In contrast, when given a story with different characters (e.g., countries) and an analogically similar plot (e.g., one country gives computers to the other to guide its missiles in exchange for an agreement not to shoot the missiles at them), people were unlikely to recall the original story. This nding suggests that retrieval which requires making a comparison of the cue against the contents of memoryuses a computationally simple form of similarity (see Holyoak & Koh, 1987; Reeves & Weisberg, 1994; Ross, 1989; Wharton, Holyoak, Downing, Lange, & Wickens, 1991, for related studies). Although structure was not important for retrieving analogs in the study by Gentner et al. (1993), it was important in peoples judgments of similarity when they were given the same pairs of stories to compare. When people were shown pairs of stories together, the highest similarity ratings were given to stories that shared the same plot, even if they had different characters. In contrast, stories with similar characters and a different plot were judged as much less similar. In fact, the pattern of rated similarity was the reverse of that of memory reminding. Thus, when people were making only a single114 Basic Mechanisms

comparison (with no time pressure), their judgments strongly relied on structural overlap, but retrieval from memory showed little effect of common structure. This distinction between types of similarities led Forbus and Gentner to hypothesize that the initial retrieval stage in similarity-based remindings are a cheap parallel search for possible matches. This hypothesis is embodied in computational models of analogy and analogical reminding (Forbus et al., 1995; Thagard, Holyoak, Nelson, & Gochfeld, 1990). For example, in Forbus and colleagues (1995) MAC/FAC (many are called/few are chosen) model, analogical retrieval begins with a parallel sweep to nd items in memory that share similar representational elements without regard to the structure of the representations. Once a small candidate set of remindings is found, a second stage makes a structural comparison between the cue and the items retrieved in the rst pass. The best structural matches to the cue are retained and explained.

Similarity and Metacognition

Here we propose to extend the notion of fast and efcient similarity estimation processes. A computationally simple form of similarity that calculates the degree of similarity could operate all the time searching for similarities among items in the environment as well as between items in the environment and background knowledge. This process could serve as the basis of metacognitive judgments of where to spend processing effort. That is, a pair that has some initial overlap is likely to yield a better return on processing effort than is a pair that has little overlap. This proposal would explain why the feeling of similarity is so accessible. Similarity theorists have rarely considered why people are able to make judgments of similarity so easily, or why similarity is such a compelling part of conscious experience. The view we outline here suggests that the initial assessment of similarity is used as a guide for the allocation of attentional resources (see Markman, 2001, for a related discussion). It provides a reliable guide for further processing. On this account, much of the process of accessing and computing similarity comparisons may not be consciously accessible; indeed, unconscious outputs may drive further cognitive processing. It should be clear that explicit similarity judgments and numerical ratings (like those often collected in the lab) may not reect the range of ways in which similarity processes can inuence cognition and behavior. Another instance of rough, nonstructural similarity processing may occur early in processing a comparison. Even when a comparison is explicitly presentedremoving the need for a reminding from long-term-memorythe early stages of similarity and analogy processing appear local and unstrucNonintentional Similarity Processing 115

tured. This is captured in the structure-mapping engine (SME, described in the section Similarity and Comparisons in Development) by an initial stage that creates a multitude of local matches, with no regard for structural consistency; overall structural consistency emerges later in processing (Falkenhainer et al., 1989; Forbus et al., 1995). Findings with metaphors underscore the idea of an initial rapid similarity process followed by a slower, more detailed process. An early study by Glucksberg, Gildea, and Bookin (1982) asked people to judge whether sentences were literally true or false in a timed task. Some of the literally false sentences were metaphors (e.g., Some jobs are jails). People were slower to reject these metaphoric sentences than to reject false sentences that had no interesting semantic overlap (e.g., Some dogs are birds), indicating that metaphoric processing begins before literal processing is complete. Wolff and Gentner (2000) further found that people were equally slow to reject reversed metaphors (e.g., Some jails are jobs). There are three salient points here. First, the fact that the interference effects are independent of the order of the terms suggests that the initial stages of metaphor processing are symmetric. Second, metaphoric interference is far greater for high-similarity metaphors like Some soldiers are pawns than for low-similarity metaphors like Some senators are pawns, regardless of whether the metaphors occur in forward or reversed order. Third, these interference effects occur early in processing; by 1,1001,200 ms, the metaphors are detected as (literally) false and rejected. These results are consistent with an early, rapid symmetrical similarity process. Wolff and Gentner (2000) also veried that the metaphors were directional when processed to completion. This is a crucial point because metaphors are known to be strongly directional: for example, people greatly prefer Some jobs are jails to Some jails are jobs (Ortony, 1979). Further, according to the structure-mapping model, the initial alignment process is followed by directional projection of inferences. Thus, metaphoric directionality should emerge if people are allowed to complete the comprehension process. Consistent with this prediction, when new subjects were given the same metaphors as in the prior studies and asked to indicate whether the metaphor was comprehensible, they showed strong directional preferences: 75% of the forward metaphors were judged comprehensible, compared to 37% of the reversed metaphors. Further, forward metaphors were comprehended more quickly than reversed metaphors (M = 1,644 ms for forward, M = 1,778 ms for reversed). Also, as predicted, high-similarity metaphors were more likely to be judged comprehensible than low-similarity metaphors. In sum, the results indicate that early processing of metaphors, as tapped in the interference effect, is symmetrical; but when full processing is allowed, there is a strong directional advantage for forward metaphors. Overall, the pattern ts the structure-mapping claim of initially symmetrical processing followed by later directional projection of inferences.116 Basic Mechanisms

Carrying these ndings to the next logical step, Wolff and Gentner (2004) gave subjects a task in which they received sentences like the aboveincluding forward or reversed metaphors, literal similarity statements, and anomalous sentences that were clearly falseand had to say whether they were comprehensible before a deadline passed. As expected, at long deadlines (1,800 ms), the forward metaphors were rated as comprehensible far more often than the reversed. However, at short deadlines (1,200 ms), the forward and reversed metaphors were indistinguishable. Importantly, both are more comprehensible than the anomalous sentences at fast deadlines, indicating that they have attracted some early processing attention. These results t with our conjecture that an early rapid similarity assessment is used to guide the allocation of processing resources. Here the early similarity comparison process identies sentences that share semantic overlap both the forward and reversed metaphors. As indicated by the results of the full-comprehension studies, once such a semantically overlapping sentence is identied, a more elaborate process of structural alignment and inference projection takes place, such that some of these initially promising sentences will be accepted and others rejected. Research on sentence verication is also consistent with this proposal. For example, Smith, Shoben, and Rips (1974) examined the speed with which people could verify sentences like A dog is an animal. Of particular interest to them was the nding that people were very fast to respond to false sentences like A dog is a bird, but slower to respond to false sentences like A bat is a bird. They suggested that people are using the initial similarity of bat and bird as a guide to processing. In contrast, the absence of similarity between dog and bird is a reliable indication that dogs are not birds. In the results so far, we have focused on cases in which the detection of similarity leads to the allocation of more attentional resources. However, there are cases in which the effect of similarity is to allocate fewer resources. We will return to this point when we consider infant habituation studies in the next section. Although the feeling of similarity may be consciously accessible, the basis of this judgment may not be consciously accessible. One way to see this point is that associations between words increase peoples similarity ratings for a pair, even though these associations do not increase the number of commonalities of a pair (Bassok & Medin, 1997; Gentner & Brem, 1999; Wisniewski & Bassok, 1999). For example, coffee and milk are rated as more similar than coffee and lemonade, even though they do not share more properties, because of their strong co-occurrence association. This observation could be taken to suggest that similarity and relatedness are psychologically intertwined, or that they are simply two different aspects of the same process. However, Gentner and Brem (1999) suggest that it is sometimes difcult to tell the difference between two different cognitive senNonintentional Similarity Processing 117

sations: the sense of similarity that results from comparing items and discovering commonalities, and the sense of associative linkage that results from retrieving a stored association.2 Indeed, one could ask whether similarity and association result from the same process (e.g., Bassok & Medin, 1997; Sloman, 1996). One piece of evidence that there are different underlying processes despite this confusion, is that there are two patterns of results over the same materials. When asked to choose which is most similar to a dart, some people choose a bulls-eye as more similar than a javelin. However, if people are given a word extension taskfor example, they are told that darts are called blickets in a certain languagethey virtually always extend the new term to the similar item (javelin) and never to the associate (Gentner & Brem, 1999). Thus, even though the cognitive sensations engendered by comparison activity and by retrieval of associations may be difcult to distinguish explicitly, the processes may have separate courses and separate implicit outcomes. From the perspective of this chapter, if we postulate a set of early signals used to guide the allocation of attentional resources, then it makes sense to include associative retrieval as well as a sense of similarity in this set, because associations are another good indication that additional processing would be fruitful. The early sense of something interesting happening may be difcult to distinguish (or perhaps even identical) for nding a stored association and computing a new similarity. The presence of a metacognitive process that makes use of the output of similarity judgments to guide future processing has important implications for cognitive processing. One that we explore in the rest of this chapter is that the presence of similarities among items will inuence cognitive processes that operate on those items. Thus, the nonintentional perception of similarities between items that occurs during the normal course of processing will have unintended effects on the output of other cognitive processes.

Nonintentional SimilarityIn this section, we explore the implications of using similarity processing whether or not it is explicitly coded as similarityto allocate attentional resources. We begin with a discussion of information that infants and children are able to extract from repeated presentations of a similar pattern. Then we turn to research on adults that demonstrates that people process information differently when items are similar than when they are dissimilar. This work comes from studies of conceptual combination, decision making, and person perception. Finally, we broaden the discussion to consider some inuences of

118 Basic Mechanisms

similarity that occur when people are induced to make comparisons during processing.

Similarity and Comparisons in Development

It is generally assumed that infants cognitive processing is less strategic than that of adults. Thus, inuences of similarities on the cognitive abilities of infants can be viewed as evidence that nonintentional similarity affects the output of cognitive processes. We begin by describing some inuences of similarity on infant cognition and then turn to data from older children. Many studies of infant cognition make use of the habituation paradigm. Habituation studies with infants rely on the observation that repeated presentations of a set of items eventually lead to a decrease in attention (e.g., Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985; Eimas, 1971). The general technique is to expose the infant to an event and then repeat the event until the infants looking time to the event decreases. In this case, similarity leads to a reduced allocation of resources; intuitively, infants act as though they are bored. At this point, test events are given. If the infants looking time remains the same, then the experimenter infers that this event is treated by the infant as similar to the one seen previously. If the infants looking time increases (i.e., they dishabituate), then the experimenter infers that the current event is seen by the infant as different from the habituation event. In these studies, the stimuli need not be identical on each trial. For example, when 7-month-old infants are presented with a series of pictures of members of a particular category (e.g., cats), their looking time will decrease over trials (e.g., Cohen & Younger, 1983). Thus, in this case, the assessment of similarity is being used to suggest that additional resources need not be expended. Often these studies include a test phase in which a new item is presented. If infants look longer at a test trial than they did at trials at the end of the habituation phase, this is interpreted as evidence that they noticed a difference between the test trial and the habituation trials. What is important for the present purposes, however, is that a feeling of similarity can be used to drive the allocation of resources. In one set of studies, Baillargeon (1991) examined infants ability to reason about the properties of a hidden object. First, subjects in the study were habituated to an event in which a screen that was initially at on a table rotated backward through a 180 arc. After habituation, a box was placed on the table in front of the subject, and then the screen was again rotated. In the possible event condition, the screen rotated back until it reached the angle at which it touched the top of the box and stopped. In the impossible event condition, the screen rotated back so that it would have passed through

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the top 50% or the top 80% of the boxs height. When given this task alone, 6.5-month-old infants dishabituated to the 80% violation, but not the 50% violation, and 4.5-month-old infants remained habituated to both of these impossible events. A subsequent experiment demonstrated the importance of similarity to this type of physical reasoning. During the test event, two boxes of the same height were used. One was in the path of the screen and the other was not, so that the second box would always be visible to the infant. Furthermore, the perceptual similarity of the two boxes was varied, so that they were identical, similar, or dissimilar. When the boxes were identical, both 4.5- and 6.5month-old infants dishabituated to the 50% violations. When the boxes were highly similar but not identical (i.e., same size and shape but different color), the 6.5-month-olds, but not the 4.5-month-olds, dishabituated to the 50% violation. Finally, neither group of infants reliably dishabituated to this violation when the boxes were dissimilar. This nding suggests that infants would spontaneously use the visible box as a kind of standard to help them calibrate the height of the occluded box only when there was considerable perceptual similarity (even though the relevant comparison involved only the height dimension). The younger the infant, the greater the degree of perceptual similarity required to align the standard with the box when occluded. Other ndings suggest that infants may be able to use similarities in a set of stimuli to generate representations of relational information in stimuli. As one demonstration of this point, Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, and Vishton (1999) played 7-month-old infants a sequence of novel three-syllable utterances. These training utterances followed one of two patterns, either ABA (e.g., ga ti ga) or ABB (e.g., ga ti ti). During the test, the infants heard examples of the same pattern they had heard during training or examples of a different pattern. Importantly, the test utterances used a new set of syllables different from those in the training utterances (e.g., wo fe wo or wo fe fe). In this work, the dependent measure was the infants looking time at a light ashing over a speaker from which the syllables were played. Infants looked reliably longer at the source when the utterances violated the abstract pattern heard during training than when the new utterances followed the training pattern, suggesting that they were dishabituating to the new pattern. A similar result was obtained by Gomez and Gerken (1999) with 12-montholds using a more complex articial grammar.3 A model of the inuence of repeated comparisons on this task was developed by Gentner, Kuehne, and Forbus (2004; Kuehne, Gentner, & Forbus, 2000). This model made use of the SEQL architecture, a model of category learning by abstraction over exemplars that uses the SME (Falkenhainer et al., 1989) to carry out its similarity computation and to derive its abstractions (Skorstad, Gentner, & Medin, 1988). Briey, SME is a computational model that takes as input structured representations of the two items being120 Basic Mechanisms

compared. For example, the relation that the rst and third syllables in an utterance are the same might be represented as SAME (wo1, wo3). The output of SME is a set of correspondences between the items that satises the constraints on analogy described above (e.g., structural consistency and systematicity). SEQL extends this model by making repeated comparisons. Each comparison yields a set of commonalities, which are retained and used in comparison with the next input item. Over time, the abstraction comes to contain the relational commonalities that reoccur across the items in the input. Importantly, these comparisons are made automatically and are not under strategic control, making this process appropriate for modeling infant habituation. In the domain of utterances, repeated comparisons among utterances with a common relational structure allow the model to abstract away the relational commonalities from a set of items, leaving few if any surface (i.e., phonological) properties. When the model is given the same sequence of input utterances (with each syllable represented with 12 phonetic features) as the infant and tested on the same test patterns, it nds the new patterns markedly less similar to its abstraction than the old ones. There are two types of similarities that infants are likely to use to create relational representations of the novel utterances. First, each utterance contains some similar elements (i.e., the rst and last syllables in the ABA utterances and the repeated syllables in the ABB utterances). These repetitions are a form of internal regularity that may be salient for infants as it is for adults (Ferguson, 1994; Kubovy, 1995; Leyton, 1992). In addition, because utterances following the same pattern are repeated, infants may compare across patterns in the manner described above to notice relational similarities. The idea that repeated comparisons can facilitate childrens ability to represent more abstract relational systems can also be seen in a study with preschool children done by Kotovsky and Gentner (1996). In this study, 4-yearold children were given a similarity choice task in which they were shown a standard and were asked to determine which of two comparison gures showed the same abstract pattern. The standard and comparison gures were congurations of three geometric shapes in a line. The shapes in a conguration were the same except for one dimension: size or darkness of color. In the standard, the conguration either had the pattern ABA (symmetry) or ABC (monotonic change). One comparison gure had a conguration with the same abstract relation either along the same dimension or along a different dimension than the standard. The other conguration had the same three shapes in an arbitrary pattern (e.g., ABB on a symmetry trial or ACB on a monotonic change trial). Children chose whichever alternative they felt was most similar to the standard; they were given no feedback beyond general encouragement. The 4-year-olds were reliably above chance at this task on trials where the standard and comparison gures varied along the same dimension (e.g.,Nonintentional Similarity Processing 121

all varied in size or all varied in darkness) and when the polarity of the relation was the same (e.g., when little-big-little was matched to little-big-little), but not when the polarity was reversed (e.g., little-big-little to big-little-big). These children were also unable to perform cross-dimensional matches, where the standard varied along a different dimension than the comparison gures (e.g., dark-light-dark vs. big-little-big). Thus, 4-year-olds required substantial perceptual similarity to support the abstract match. Kotovsky and Gentner (1996) suggested that repeated simple comparisons might lead to abstracting structural regularities that would enable children to learn to do the more difcult cross-dimensional matches. To test this possibility, the comparisons were given in a blocked fashion. First, a block of within-dimension trials was given. Within this block, children rst saw congurations that varied only in size (which they tended to nd easy) and then congurations that varied only in color (which they tended to nd more difcult). Only after this block were they given cross-dimensional trials that involved changes in both size and color. Children who responded correctly to the initial within-dimension trials were able to perform the cross-dimensional matches reliably as well. In order to rule out a simple practice effect, a second group was initially given the same number of within-dimension trials as the above group, but they saw only triads involving the size dimension. These children performed well on within-dimension trials but were not able to do the cross-dimension trials successfully. This result suggests that repeated within-dimension comparisons support the creation of more abstract relational representations that were then useful in performing the cross-dimensional matches. Obviously, this study involved comparisons that were part of the experimental task rather than spontaneous comparisons, but these ndings are consistent with the Marcus et al. (1999) data described above. The idea that comparisons promote the recognition of abstract relational similarities received additional support from research by Gentner and Namy (1999; Namy & Gentner, 2002) on word learning in 4-year-olds. They examined how children would extend a novel noun that they heard. For one group of children, the noun was applied to a single object (e.g., the experimenter pointed to a picture of a bicycle and said, This is a dax). For a second group, the same procedure was followed for a tricycle as standard. A third group was shown both standards (which were always from the same taxonomic category) and invited to compare them; for example, the experimenter pointed rst to a bicycle and then to a tricycle and said, This is a dax, and this is a dax too. Can you see why theyre both daxes? The children were then shown two test objects. One test object was perceptually similar to the standard(s) but belonged to a different category (e.g., eyeglasses). The second test object was not perceptually similar to the standard(s), but belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., a skateboard). The children were asked122 Basic Mechanisms

which of these alternatives should be given the same label as the standard (e.g., Can you show me another dax?). When given either of the two standards by themselves, children tended to select the perceptual match (the eyeglasses). When shown both standards together, children chose the taxonomic match, despite preferring the perceptual match for either of the standards presented singly. That is, carrying out a comparison enabled children to override compelling perceptual commonalities in favor of deeper conceptual ones. This outcome provides critical evidence that carrying out a structural alignment facilitates attention to common functional and causal relations over common perceptual features. Thus, when children are invited to compare a pair of objects, they are much more likely to focus on more abstract properties like those that form the basis of taxonomic categorization. These results show that engaging in a comparison process can actually shift the basis for categorization from perceptual properties to conceptual relations. This is because, as predicted by structure-mapping theory, comparison leads to alignment of common relational structure, thereby promoting the relations salience. This relational focus is most dramatic in a far analogy, where there are few object commonalities; but common relations are promoted to some degree even in close similarity comparisons. Because relations (even core relations such as internal causal or function relations) tend to be less accessible than object features, this alignment process will render relational commonalities more obvious in the pair than in either of the separate exemplars. In other words, the relations stand to gain more from this alignment process than do more obvious object properties. In this section, we have reviewed ndings that assess the inuence of similarity and comparison on cognitive processing in infants and young children. The presence of compelling similarities in the environment supports complex reasoning. These comparisons also enable children to extract more abstract commonalities of items than they would be able to nd when considering a single object. Furthermore, these effects occur spontaneously, but they can also be observed when the task calls for a more explicit comparison. In the next section, we turn to a parallel set of phenomena in research with adults.

Changes in Adults Processing With Similarity

Cognitive processing in adults is typically more strategic than that of children. There are many instances in which the particular strategy that people adopt is inuenced by whether the items being processed are similar. We suggest that this effect occurs because similarity affects the way processing resources are allocated. To demonstrate this point, we begin with some results from studies of conceptual combination. Then we turn to research on decisionNonintentional Similarity Processing 123

making. We end with a discussion of research on person perception. In all of these cases, the inuences of similarity are likely to be unintentional, because the goal of the task does not require attention to similarity. Conceptual Combination Conceptual combination is the study of the way people interpret complex noun phrases such as adjective-noun combinations like the brown apple and noun-noun combinations like the turkey apple. In the present discussion, we focus only on noun-noun combinations, which have been the subject of extensive research (Costello & Keane, 2000; Gagne, 2000; Gerrig & Murphy, 1992; Murphy, 1988; Wisniewski & Gentner, 1991; Wisniewski & Love, 1998). In a noun-noun combination like goose horse, the rst noun typically modies the second, and so the rst noun is called the modier, and the second is called the head. Studies of conceptual combination suggest that there are three dominant strategies that people adopt when interpreting novel noun-noun phrases. The rst, called property mapping, involves carrying over a property from the modier to the head. For example, a goose horse could be interpreted as a horse with a long neck, in which case the property long neck is carried from goose to horse. The second strategy, called relational combination,4 involves positing a relationship between the two nouns. For example, a goose horse could be interpreted as a horse that lives near geese. Finally, some noun-noun combinations are hybrids, which involve combining the two concepts on a massive scale. Often, the denition given by a subject simply species that the resulting combination is a mix of the two concepts. For example, a goose horse could be interpreted as a mixture of goose and horse. This denition species that the referent is such a complete combination of the concepts that the individual components could not be separated out. An important observation is that the relative frequency of different kinds of combinations changes as a function of the similarity of the constituents of the noun phrase (Markman & Wisniewski, 1997; Wisniewski, 1996; Wisniewski & Gentner, 1991). In general, the more similar the pair, the more likely that it will be given a property mapping interpretation. For extremely similar pairs, hybrid interpretations also become common. One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is easier to align the representations of similar pairs than of dissimilar pairs. This alignment highlights an alignable difference of a pair (e.g., that geese have longer necks than do horses) which can be carried over from the modier to the head noun in property denitions. When a pair is very similar, their representations are highly alignable, which makes combining the concepts into a hybrid more attractive. Dissimilar pairs are less likely to be spontaneously aligned, and hence give rise to fewer property mapping denitions.

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As support for this account, Wisniewski and Markman (1993) had people interpret conceptual combinations of noun phrases for which other subjects had listed commonalities and differences. They found that the properties carried over in property mapping denitions were much more likely to be alignable differences of a pair than to be nonalignable differences. This phenomenon demonstrates clearly how similarity can affect cognitive processing in indirect ways. Decision Making Decision-making situations are ones in which people have an unsatised goal and at least two different courses of action (where one of those courses of action may be to do nothing or to defer the choice). Decision making is particularly interesting to look at from the perspective of nonintentional similarity because people use many different strategies for making choices (Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993). Thus, it is easy to look at how peoples strategies shift with the similarity of the options. In addition, at some level all choices require some form of comparison. Economic models predict that options are evaluated abstractly for their goodness or utility and that only these utilities are compared. However, often choice strategies involve comparison of one or more of the more specic attributes of the options (Medin, Goldstone, & Markman, 1995). We make two general points in this section. First, increasing the similarity of the options increases the degree to which people compare specic attributes of those options when making a choice. Second, when people compare the options, they tend to focus on the alignable differences of the options rather than on the nonalignable differences. As one demonstration that similarity of options affects the way people make choices, Johnson (1984) asked people to make choices between options that were comparable (e.g., two toasters) or noncomparable (e.g., a toaster and a smoke alarm) at the level of their specic features. For comparable choice sets, people describing their choice process mentioned specic attributes of the options. For example, when choosing between toasters, they might mention the number of slots or the number of heat settings. In contrast, when choosing between noncomparable choice sets, people tended to use abstract attributes such as utility. For example, when deciding between a toaster and a smoke alarm, the choice involved which item they needed more. Specic attributes of the products did not enter into the choice. This nding suggests that when the options are comparable, people spontaneously access the commonalities and differences of the options. In contrast, when the options are difcult to compare, other strategies are brought to bear to make the choice. Ease of comparison also inuences the attributes people use to make choices. In a simple demonstration of this point, Tversky and Kahneman (1986) gave

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people choices between the pairs of gambles shown in table 5.1. In these gambles, people would be paid an amount that depended on the color of a marble drawn from a basket. Some people chose between A and B, and others chose between C and D. Gamble A is clearly better than Gamble B, because the green marble has a higher payoff and the blue one a lower loss for Gamble A than for Gamble B. Consistent with this analysis, everyone in the group given this pair of gambles selected gamble A. Gambles C and D are equivalent to A and B. Gamble C is created from Gamble A by merging the green marble into the set of red marbles. Gamble D is created from Gamble B by merging the blue marble into the set of yellow marbles. Despite the fact that Gamble C is strictly better than Gamble D in the same way A is better than B, 58% of the people given the choice between Gambles C and D chose D. This choice is based on the fact that a comparison of the outcomes of C and D makes salient the loss of $10 versus the gain of $30 associated with the green marble. Thus, people appear to be focusing on the attributes that are easy to compare rather than calculating the expected value of the gamble, which is a more general measure of a gambles goodness. From the standpoint of structural alignment, strategies that involve property comparisons are particularly interesting, because decisions must focus on the differences among options. Some research has explored whether people spontaneously use alignable differences among options rather than nonalignable differences. In a classic set of studies, Slovic and MacPhillamy (1974) found that people making judgments about which of a pair of students would have a higher grade point average were more likely to make use of scores on a test that both had taken (i.e., an alignable difference) than scores on a test that only one of them had taken (i.e., a nonalignable difference). More gener-

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ally, it has been observed that people tend to discount dimensions for which one option has a missing value relative to dimensions for which all options have a value (Markman & Medin, 1995; Ross & Creyer, 1992; Sanbonmatsu, Kardes, & Herr, 1992). In one set of studies, Zhang and Markman (1998) looked specically at the use of alignable and nonalignable differences in choice. A series of three novel brands of microwave popcorn were introduced across two experimental sessions. In the rst session, subjects were exposed to a description of one brand of popcorn that included 10 attributes. In the second session, the initial brand was shown again followed by descriptions of two other brands that also included 10 attributes. Across the set, four of the attributes were commonalities of all of the brands. Three of the attributes were alignable differences. Finally, three of the attributes were nonalignable differences. People were better able to recall the alignable differences than the nonalignable differences. In addition, the alignable differences had a bigger impact on peoples preferences than did the nonalignable differences. This nding suggests that people spontaneously compared the attributes of the new brands to the attributes of the brand learned rst in the course of forming their preferences (but see Zhang & Markman, 2001, for a discussion of boundary conditions on the use of alignable differences). Two central conclusions can be drawn from this research on decision making. First, the ease with which options can be compared affects what kind of information is available for choice processing. When the options can be compared easily, then their attributes are used to make a decision. When the options cannot be compared easily, choice strategies that involve more abstract evaluations of the options are brought to bear. Second, when the choice sets are comparable, the alignable differences among options are often more important to peoples decisions than are nonalignable differences. These effects occur despite the fact that there is no explicit direction to compare the attributes of the options. Comparisons occur as a by-product jointly considering the two alternatives, and strongly inuence choice processing. Situation Perception and Person Perception One inuence of comparisons that we have not yet addressed involves the way that known information inuences the way that new items are represented. People spontaneously make comparisons between background knowledge and new situations that affect how those situations are perceived. The background knowledge that gets used may be general schemas or it may involve specic instances. In this section, we start with inuences of reminding in the physical arena. Then we move to effects of comparisons on person perception. Comparisons of new situations to known situations are common in cognitive processing. This has been explored in some detail in research on analogy and metaphor. Analogies and metaphors are often used to help people strucNonintentional Similarity Processing 127

ture their knowledge about a new domain by carrying over the relations from a known domain. In one extended analysis, Gentner and Gentner (1983) examined the way people reasoned about the ow of electricity based on whether they conceptualized it as being like the ow of water or like the movement of a crowd. Some aspects of electricity are reasonably easy to conceptualize using either analogy. For example, both analogies help people to differentiate current from voltage. However, these analogies are not equally good at explaining all aspects of electricity. For example, in the moving-crowd model it is much easier to reason about resistors than about batteries. In contrast, the owing-water model is more transparent for batteries than for resistors. As would be predicted by this analysis, when asked to reason about circuits with combinations of components in series or in parallel, people who held the moving-crowd model were relatively better at reasoning about combinations of resistors than about combinations of batteries, and the reverse was true for people with the owing-water model. The application of analogical systems also occurs in real life, sometimes with little explicit awareness. For example, Kempton (1986) studied the use of analogies in peoples naive theories of home heat control. A thermostat can be conceptualized as being like a switch or as being like an accelerator. The switch model (which is the correct one) suggests that when the temperature in a room cools to a certain point, a switch goes on and the heater starts. The heater continues operating until the temperature exceeds the set point, at which time the heater shuts off and the cycle continues. The accelerator model says that the amount of heat produced by the heater is proportional to the difference between the current temperature and the set point, just as pressing down the accelerator of a car further increases the amount of gas that reaches the engine and hence the speed of the engine. People who hold this incorrect model tend to change their thermostats more times each day and tend to use more energy to heat their homes. As a further example, historians have examined the inuence of analogies such as the domino theory on political decisions (Glad & Taber, 1990). Before the United Nations intervened in the Korean War, the political situation was often framed using an analogy of a line of falling dominos, where the fall of a single domino causes the entire line to collapse. In this analogy, Communism was an external force pressing on the governments of countries. If one government fell, then many others would follow soon after. As a consequence of this analogy, the Communist insurgency in Korea was viewed as coming from the outside, and thus the United Nations could intervene. Had this same conict been viewed as a civil war, the United Nations would not have been able to get involved. To complete this discussion, it is important to recognize that mappings between domains can become conventionalized. For example, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discuss a number of metaphorical systems in English in128 Basic Mechanisms

which a domain is described in terms initially used by a second domain (e.g., He was boiling mad). We suggest that such systems develop through a process in which repeated comparisons lead to progressive abstraction of metaphorical meanings (much as in the sequential categorization models discussed earlier). This conventionalization process results in the existence of alternative meanings for words that once were active metaphors (Gentner & Wolff, 1997). For example, the verb boil now has a metaphorical meaningto become emotionally agitated [like a boiling liquid]as well as its literal meaning. There are also more global metaphoric systems. For example, Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002; Gentner, 2001) showed that space-time metaphors are comprehended in terms of two different global systems of mappings, rather than on an individual lexical basis. In particular, there are two main spatial metaphors for time. In one, an individual moves through time (e.g., We are approaching Christmas). In the other, time moves toward the individual (e.g., Christmas is approaching) Gentner et al. (2002) showed that people process a sequence of temporal sentences faster if the sentences remain in the same space-time metaphor; there appears to be a processing cost for a shift from one of these metaphor systems to the other. Further, Boroditsky (2000) demonstrated that the mapping is asymmetrical: people conceptualize time in terms of space. In one study, people were primed with pictures of individuals moving past objects or of objects moving on a conveyor belt past people. Then, they were given the sentence Wednesdays meeting has been moved forward two days, and were asked to state on what day the meeting would occur (McGlone & Harding, 1998). If space-time priming occurs, the two spatial situations should prime different interpretations of the temporal sentence. A person moving past a set of objects should prime the ego-moving metaphor system. In contrast, objects moving past a person should prime the time-moving metaphor. Consistent with these predictions, people in the moving-person condition considered that moving the meeting forward changed it to Friday, whereas people in the moving-object condition considered that the meeting was moved to Monday. Furthermore, the reverse priming could not be obtained. That is, using different metaphors for time did not inuence peoples reasoning about space. The use of background knowledge is also important for forming impressions about people. Theories of social comparison (e.g., Festinger, 1954; Goethals & Darley, 1977) have acknowledged the diagnostic advantages of comparisons with standards who are similar in critical ways. Similarity is important in social comparison processes in at least two ways. First, there is considerable evidence that perceived similarity inuences the selection of a standard. Second, the psychological consequences of social comparisons for self-evaluation, affect, and behavior also depend critically on the perceived similarity to the standard (e.g., Brown, Novick, Lord, & Richards, 1992; Catrambone, Beike, & Niedenthal, 1996; Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995; LockNonintentional Similarity Processing 129

wood & Kunda, 1997; Mussweiler, 2003). Mussweiler and Gentner (2004) found evidence that social comparisons involve a process of structural alignment and mapping. Selection of a standard was sensitive not merely to surface commonalities between the self and the social comparison standard (e.g., being good at sports), but also to higher order relational structures (e.g., caring enough about mastery in some arenawhether sports or musicto sacrice greatly to achieve it). Further, consistent with the framework already presented, making a social comparison appears to render the common information more accessible. Social comparison is also an important inuence on rst impressions. When we meet a new individual, we typically have a limited set of interactions with him or her. Nonetheless, we are quickly able to form impressions about this persons characteristics and to determine whether this person is someone we want to get to know better. An intriguing set of ndings by Andersen and colleagues (Andersen & Cole, 1990; Chen & Andersen, 1999; Chen, Andersen, & Hinkley, 1999) suggests that similarities between new people and particular known individuals affect how the new person is perceived. As a demonstration of this point, subjects in experiments are asked to describe the characteristics of a signicant other such as their mother. The same subjects are asked to participate in an unrelated study at another time. They are given descriptions of new people, some of whom have characteristics in common with the signicant others they described. People are more likely to attribute other characteristics of their signicant other to the new person than are control subjects who did not have this signicant other. This nding suggests that similarities of a new person to known individuals have a strong inuence on the way the new person is represented (see chapter 16). To summarize, comparisons between new situations and background knowledge have an important inuence on the way people represent and reason about the new situation. These comparisons often happen spontaneously. The point of having background knowledge is to enable a reasoner to recognize a familiar situation and to apply previous strategies to new cases. Initially, the relationship between a new domain and existing knowledge must involve an active comparison between domains. Eventually, however, if a mapping between domains is important enough to reoccur, it may be stored and become part of the background for the domain.

ConclusionIn this chapter, we have examined a number of inuences of similarity on cognitive processing. These effects often occur spontaneously in cognitive processing, though some of the experiments we described involved tasks in which people were directed to make comparisons. We discussed four central130 Basic Mechanisms

inuences of similarity on cognitive processing. First, comparisons may help people to see more abstract commonalities between situations than they would be able to nd if only one domain were explored in isolation. We demonstrated this point with a number of developmental studies involving infants and young children. Second, the presence of similarities between items can inuence cognitive processing by making specic properties of the items readily available. In particular, comparable pairs promote access to the commonalities and differences of items, which can then inuence processing. Third, the presence of some similarities among items can be used as a signal that additional processing resources should be devoted to exploring a pair. This metacognitive aspect of similarity is evident in demonstrations that similarities inuence looking time in infants and response times in adults. The similarity processes that give rise to these metacognitive judgments also appear to incorporate other information such as associations between terms that may signal that additional processing would be useful. Finally, new situations are spontaneously compared to previous experiences. These comparisons facilitate the representation of the new domain. Comparisons that are made frequently may become stored concepts. Another important aspect of similarity is the distinction between the full structural alignment process and cheaper kinds of similarity processing. We suggested, rst, that a quick, cheap similarity process is used to generate reminders from long-term memory, and, second, that early in any similarity comparison the processing is a kind of free-for-all of local matches. When the process of comparison is carried further, however, it results in the alignment of the representational structures of the two items. These comparisons promote noticing the commonalities and alignable differences of pairs, which can then be used in a variety of cognitive processes such as decision making, reasoning, problem solving, and person perception. We suggest that these similarity processes are always active. In particular, the comparison process that inuences metacognitive judgments need not be under conscious control, and need not yield products that are consciously accessible. Thus, the presence of similarities among items may have unintended inuences on higher level cognitive processes, because attentional resources may be allocated on the basis of nonintentional similarity comparisons.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by NSF Grant SBR-9905013 to the rst author and by ONR Grant N0001492-J-1098, NSF Grant SBR-9511757, and NSF-LIS Grant SBR-9720313 to the second author. The authors thank Miriam Bassok, Eric Dietrich, Ryan Gossen, Brad Love, Hunt Stilwell, and Ed Wisniewski for helpful comments on this research. The authors thank Jason Kidd for an MVPcaliber season. The authors also thank Ran Hassin, Jim Uleman, and John Bargh for their patience and their excellent comments.Nonintentional Similarity Processing 131

Notes1. Formally, the process of nding the maximal match between two predicate structures is a variant of the problem of matching two arbitrary directed acyclic graphs. This problem is known to be in the class of NP-complete problems, meaning that the effort required to perform the computation is some exponential function of the size of the representations (see Falkenhainer et al., 1989, for more discussion). 2. There are, of course, cases of stored similarity linkssuch as horse and zebrathat may be retrieved from memory like other stored associations. What we are contrasting here is newly computed similarities versus stored associations. 3. Interestingly, the looking-time measure used in the study by Gomez and Gerken (1999) showed the opposite pattern from that found by Marcus et al. (1999). Infants in this study looked reliably longer at new strings that followed the training grammar than at strings that did not follow the training grammar. The source of this difference is not clear. One possibility is that the materials used by Gomez and Gerken were more complex than those used by Marcus et al., which could lead to a preference for familiar strings (Cohen, 2001). 4. This terminology is unfortunate, because relational combinations actually involve associative relations rather than relational commonalities.

Nonintentional Similarity Processing 137

Imagination [is] a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom conscious. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason1

Counterfactuals are thoughts of what might have been. They are mental representations of alternatives to past occurrences, features, and states. As such, they are imaginative constructions fabricated from stored representations, typically embracing a blend of traces from both episodic and semantic memory. For example, If only she had remembered her umbrella, she would have stayed dry is a counterfactual rooted to (and directly evoked by) an episodic memory involving a recent occurrence in which an acquaintance became drenched by a summer downpour. This counterfactual is constructed via alteration (or mutation) of one discrete element of the factual episode (e.g., presence versus absence of umbrella), but this mutation draws upon semantic memorys abstract generalizations about the world (e.g., umbrellas are water repellent and thus can protect from moisture). Like many judgments, counterfactual thinking can be both automatic, in that its unconscious activation may follow from the simple recognition of particular outcomes, or intentional and controlled, in that it may be deliberately recruited, sculpted, or suppressed in response to ongoing goals. Counterfactuals often take the form of if-then conditional propositions in which if corresponds to an action and then refers to a goal, such as if only she had practiced harder, then she would have passed the audition.138

Counterfactuals provide a basic context by which factual events may be benchmarked (McGill & Tenbrunsel, 2000). As such, they inuence emotions such as satisfaction (Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995) and inferences such as causation and likelihood (Roese, 1997; Spellman & Mandel, 1999), which in turn inuence global impressions of self and others (Miller, Visser, & Staub, 2001). Counterfactuals may be stored and subsequently retrieved, but far more commonly counterfactuals are constructed online in light of specic evoking outcomes (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Thus, counterfactual activation typically refers not to heightened accessibility of stored representations but to the initiation of a constructive process of mental simulation that produces novel representations. Counterfactual speculations are potentially limitless, but though they may conjure the bizarre and the fantastic, everyday counterfactual thinking is often mundane. Counterfactuals preserve the integrity of the world as we know it, altering but one or two specic features and simulating the immediate results against a backdrop that is essentially the same as actuality. Hofstadter (1979) argued that counterfactuals are an essential ingredient for consciousness and intelligence; hence, any articial intelligence device would require some subroutine that produces such thoughts in order to calibrate the meaning of episodic representations. This conception, echoed subsequently by Kahneman and Miller (1986), positioned counterfactual generation as a heuristic process that was automatic, efcient, and effortless. At the same time, however, the richly detailed hypothetical suppositions of storytellers (e.g., Philip K. Dicks 1962 novel, The Man in the High Castle, imagines a 1960s America that had been defeated in World War II and was thus partitioned into a Nazi German East Coast and an Imperial Japanese West Coast) as well as everyday social perceivers (e.g., if my sister had been accepted into medical school to become a pediatrician, then she would now be very useful in helping to diagnose my daughters mysterious cough) suggest rather more effortful and elaborative counterfactual constructions. The seminal chapter by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) was itself ambivalent on this score, in that their discussion of a simulation heuristic reected both automatic, effortless processing and also elaborative processing of complex inferences of likelihood and causality (cf. Kahneman, 1995). Current dual-processing conceptions (Chaiken & Trope, 1999) can well account for many previous ndings in the counterfactual literature. A somewhat facile summary would thus be that the process of mental simulation is automatic, but more detailed, speculative counterfactual musings can also be deployed effortfully to achieve specic conscious goals, given sufcient time or processing capacity. Beyond this summary lurks a variety of more complicated yet informative subpatterns that form the core of the present chapter. The theme is that goal perceptions offer a unifying conception of a variety of counterfactual processing effects, both automatic and controlled. Following aThe Mechanics of Imagination 139

brief overview of two theories of the determinants of counterfactual thinking, three sections follow. The rst focuses on performance goals and counterfactual activation. The second focuses on affect goals and counterfactual activation. And the third focuses on the activation by counterfactuals of mind-sets that reect higher order goal-based cognitions. We conclude by discussing implications and drawing connections to related recent research.

Theoretical Background Norm Theory

Kahneman and Millers (1986) norm theory was the rst and remains the most inuential theoretical depiction of counterfactual thinking. This work was broader than a simple exposition of counterfactual thinking, however, presenting a general model of exemplar-based concept activation with counterfactually mediated judgments presented as a particularly interesting but by no means singular consequence. Two of the theorys assertions are particularly relevant to the present discussion. First, reactions to particular events are inuenced not only by previously stored expectancies, but also by postcomputed norms. Norm theory posited that events activate semantically related exemplars from episodic memory that combine collectively to create the norm. Unlike the global anchors specied by such earlier models as adaptation level theory (Helson, 1964), norms are specic and vary as a function of the features of their evoking outcomes (McGill, 1993). Thus, counterfactuals can produce effects independently of expectancies (Medvec et al., 1995). For example, consider two individuals en route to an airport, both having identical expectancies that they will depart successfully on their assigned ights (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). Both expectancies are disconrmed in that both individuals are stuck in trafc and miss their ights. For one, however, the ight had been delayed and thus had been missed by a mere 5 minutes. For the other, the ight had departed on schedule and thus had been missed by a full 30 minutes. Most observers assume that the rst individual would be much more regretful than the second. For this person, a counterfactual is more easily constructed: it is easier to imagine having shaved off 5 than 30 minutes of travel time (e.g., by driving faster, ignoring amber trafc lights, etc.). Kahneman and Tversky argued that although both the expectancies and objective situation of each man are identical (both expect to depart on time and both arrive too late to do so), the relative availability of counterfactual representations differs and thus accounts for diverging affective responses (see also Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990; Sanna & Turley-Ames, 2000).140 Basic Mechanisms

Second, a principle of norm asymmetry governs counterfactual construction. Counterfactual representations are much more likely to embrace antecedents that seize upon an unusual, exceptional, or abnormal event and to return it to its normal state than vice versa. An automobile accident victim, for example, will likely generate if only thoughts aimed at mentally undoing the accident. A victim who had been driving an atypical route at his typical time of day would wish that he had stuck to his typical route, but another victim who had been driving along her typical route but at an atypical time of day would instead wish that she had driven at the more typical time (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). In this way, counterfactuals recapitulate norms. But more generally, this principle suggests an interesting twist on the process of category activation, in which priming is dened as the effect of activation of one representation on the activation of a semantically related one. Semantic relation is usually dened with regard to alignment between salient features of each representation (Higgins, 1996). In norm theory, priming may also be understood with regard to the placement of a construct along a dimension of normality, such that extreme category members prime representations of other category members that are positioned closer to the central tendency (or norm) of the category, but not vice versa. Plantains may remind one of bananas, but bananas rarely bring plantains to mind. Macintosh computer users frequently complain about PCs, but PC users rarely speak of Macs. Canadians dene their national identity in contrast to Americans, but Americans scarcely realize Canada exists. The extreme primes the normal, but the normal does not prime the extreme. As these examples make clear, extremity/ normality may embody a variety of specic dimensions, including numerosity, frequency of occurrence, or depth of knowledge. Although this principle bears some resemblance to the asymmetry in the direction of comparison of relational (e.g., similarity, difference) judgments that occurs when the objects of comparison differ in their extremity versus normality (e.g., Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993; Tversky, 1977), the underlying mechanisms differ markedly. When a perceiver sees greater similarity between Canada and the United States than between the United States and Canada (i.e., a direction of comparison effect), for example, differential salience of unique versus shared features drives the effect. Thus, when the more prominent object is privileged by being the subject (rather than object) of comparison (as when comparing the United States to Canada), its relatively greater amount of unique features assume prominence and thereby weaken perceptions of similarity (Gati & Tversky, 1984). By contrast, the norm theory account centers not on features within objects but rather on the relative standing of objects with regard to a distribution. Intriguingly, however, norm theory can indeed supply an independent explanation for direction of comparison asymmetry effects when norms surrounding grammatical constructionThe Mechanics of Imagination 141

are considered. Specically, in English and other languages, convention demands that the more normal category member be placed second (or last) in comparative statements (e.g., llamas are smaller than horses; but not horses are larger than llamas). Violation of this linguistic norm (within statements or questions presented to subjects) raises eyebrows, demands further consideration, and results in more moderate relational judgments (Roese, Sherman, & Hur, 1998). In general, however, the applicability of the norm theory principle of asymmetrical priming of category members, depending on their position within a distribution, has many applications yet to be articulated. Some potential examples include the manner in which minority groups establish self-identity with regard to the majority (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978), the hostility that extremist groups direct toward slightly less extreme (i.e., more moderate) groups (White & Langer, 1999), and the greater effort and attention that subordinates direct to leaders than leaders direct to subordinates (Goodwin, Gubin, Fiske, & Yzerbyt, 2000). Norm theory asserts that recognition of an atypical antecedent activates construction of a counterfactual structured around the more typical form of that antecedent. Importantly, norm theory construes norm activation and thus counterfactual activation as purely automatic, akin to a perceptual orienting response (Kahneman, 1995). Research that has specied counterfactual operations in terms of mental models similarly views counterfactual processing as a rapid, low-level operation (Byrne, 1997; Byrne, Segura, Culhane, Tasso, & Berrocal, 2000; Quelhas & Byrne, 2000). And evidence suggests that counterfactual judgments are automatic in the sense of efciency, in that cognitive load does not interfere with counterfactual inferences during encoding of focal information but does interfere with subsequent attempts to correct or suppress the inappropriate application of counterfactual inferences to judgments of victim blame and compensation (Goldinger, Kleider, Asuma, & Beike, 2003).

The Two-Stage Model

The two-stage model (Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995a, 1997) was designed to address the observation that most everyday counterfactual thoughts are not content- or valence-neutral but focus mainly on failure to achieve a desired goal.2 When people think about what might have been, they think of personally meaningful desires that have gone unmet, such as missed educational opportunities or lost loves (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Landman & Manis, 1992). Counterfactuals that are upward (i.e., specifying how outcomes might have been better) rather than downward (i.e., specifying how outcomes might have been worse) appear to be the default under many conditions, suggesting that counterfactuals typically recapitulate goals rather142 Basic Mechanisms

than norms. Thus, the two-stage model repositions counterfactual thinking in relation to motivation and performance goals rather than perceptions of base rates and typicality. A key feature of the model was the separation of the determinants of counterfactual thinking into two stages, those inuencing mere activation and those inuencing content. Failure and unmet goals in general, and the resulting negative affect in particular, activate counterfactual thinking. Normality, on the other hand, dictates the content of counterfactuals once the constructive process is initiated (Roese, 1997; Roese & Hur, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997). That is, once an accident or heartbreak prompts an individual to think about what might have been, unusual features such as out-ofcharacter behaviors will assume a central position within the counterfactual, with the counterfactual antecedent specifying in-character behaviors that ought to have been performed. If nothing out of the ordinary preceded the negative evoking outcome, counterfactuals will still be constructed, driven by the desire to avoid (mentally rather than actually) the negative outcome (Davis & Lehman, 1995). In one experiment, for example, participants were given false feedback (success vs. failure) regarding their performance on a computer-presented anagram task (Roese & Hur, 1997, Experiment 2). Participants recorded more counterfactuals in a thought-listing task following failure than following success feedback. Negative affect but not expectancies or norm violations mediated this effect. Norms, however, indeed guided the content of counterfactuals so generated. That negative affect activates counterfactual thinking was framed in terms of a functional perspective in which counterfactuals furnish useful inferences for subsequent performance enhancement (Roese, 1994, 2001). Thus, in the same way that negative affect mobilizes problem-solving cognition generally (Taylor, 1991), in part because negative affect is informative with regard to goal blockage (Schwarz, 1990), counterfactual thinking is also activated automatically by negative affect. In the two-stage model, negative affect (as opposed to norm violation) is the principal engine driving counterfactual thinking, and this was the primary divergence between it and norm theory. Evidence in support of this contention came from studies that either independently manipulated both affect and norms or simultaneously examined self-reported perceptions of both in regression analyses of counterfactual activation (Roese & Hur, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997). However, several experiments have suggested that norm violation may activate counterfactual thinking independently of affect (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000; Goldinger et al., 2003; Roese & Olson, 1996, Experiment 3). Although further work is needed to resolve the discrepancy across these studies, one obvious candidate for resolution is the central role of goal perceptions. Both affect and norm violation can inform goal inferences, which are central to counterfactual thinking in a number of ways. This is the theme of the remainder of this chapter.The Mechanics of Imagination 143

SummaryTwo theoretical depictions of counterfactual thinking, norm theory and the two-stage model, both focus on the determinants of counterfactual thinking. The two-stage model partitions determinants into those inuencing activation versus those inuencing content, with negative affect positioned as the key variable inuencing the activation stage. The theme of this chapter is that goals are a crucial component of counterfactual thinking. Accordingly, the three remaining sections each embody this theme. The rst two focus on counterfactual activation, examining the roles of performance goals and affect goals, respectively. The third section explores the goal-based consequences of counterfactuals within the context of mind-set priming.

Performance Goals and Counterfactual Activation

William James (1890) argued that the fundamental goal of cognition is to produce behavior. Perhaps the most basic description of counterfactual thinking is that it is a class of cognitions that bridges affect, goal perception, and action tendencies. In this section we explore performance goals, which center on achievement of particular outcomes, such as winning a basketball game, nding a spouse, or earning a living wage. Although affect is both a cause and consequence of such goals, it is not integral. By contrast, affect goals, explored in the subsequent section, are those in which a particular affective result, such as effective coping, satisfaction, or simply feeling good, is the goal itself. Such a distinction has proven useful in various literatures, most notably those of coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and social comparison (Suls & Wheeler, 2000).

Preparatory Causal Inferences

Counterfactual thinking may suggest particular causal insights regarding actions and desired outcomes. If a young man fails to impress a young woman to whom he is attracted, he may ponder actions that might have won her heart: if only he had showered her with gifts such as owers and candies, if only he had been more charmingly amusing, if only he had been more persistent or less pushy. Such conditional thoughts, as long as they are aimed at the past, are appropriately termed counterfactual, in that they clearly did not occur (If I had done X, I might have gotten Y). But the same hypothetical actions may also form the basis for prefactual thoughts, which are causal conditionals aimed at possible future actions (Sanna, 1996, 2000). The young man may speculate that if he deploys owers, candies, and humor in his next attempt, he may well attain romantic fulllment. Such prefactuals,144 Basic Mechanisms

also structured as action-oriented conditional propositions (If I do X, I may get Y), may form the basis of intentions, which may then propel behavior. Roese (1994) manipulated counterfactual thinking and showed that, in the context of academic achievement (Experiment 2) and a laboratory anagram task (Experiment 3), such thoughts heightened intentions to perform, and the actual performance of, specic success-facilitating behaviors. Longitudinal research by Nasco and Marsh (1999) conrmed that the relation between counterfactuals (regarding an exam grade) and subsequent academic achievement (improvement on a subsequent exam) were mediated by self-reported perceptions of contingency between actions (studying) and outcomes (succeeding). In general, expectancy-based mental simulation that focuses on specic plans and processes enhances achievement (Olson, Roese, & Zanna, 1996; Pham & Taylor, 1999; Taylor & Pham, 1996). Thus, counterfactuals, though directed at the past, can provide causal information that may supply a roadmap for future action: Counterfactuals are prescriptive.

Direction of ComparisonAs derived from the social comparison literature (cf. Folger & Kass, 2000; Kruglanski & Mayseless, 1990; Olson, Buhrmann, & Roese, 2000; Taylor & Lobel, 1989; Wood, 1989), the distinction between upward counterfactuals (e.g., If Jean had gotten that new job, her income would have doubled) and downward counterfactuals (e.g., If Jean had lost her current job, her income would have vanished) has been indispensable to the counterfactual literature. Precisely the same logic applies to prefactual thinking: An upward prefactual is a contrast between an expected trajectory and some better future prospect (e.g., Jason is not currently projected to win, but if he can woo local investors, he might just win the nomination), whereas a downward prefactual is a contrast between an expected outcome and a worse future prospect (e.g., Jason is not currently projected to win, but if he is caught in a sex scandal, his share of the popular vote will be even worse than expected). Direction of comparison is a description that applies equally well to any pairwise evaluative contrast, including counterfactual comparisons (comparing factual self to alternative self), social comparisons (comparing self to others), temporal comparisons (comparing current self to past or future self), and prefactual comparison (comparing expected future self to alternative future self).3 In all cases, an affective contrast effect seems to be the default outcome: Upward contrasts produce relatively more negative affect and downward contrasts produce more positive affect (cf. Smith, 2000). But affect aside, in previous research in both counterfactual thinking and social comparison, upward comparisons have been viewed as the most useful with regard to achieving performance goals because such thoughts specify improvement to, ratherThe Mechanics of Imagination 145

Regulatory FocusAs discussed in the section on the two-stage model, negative affect evokes upward counterfactuals. But negative affect, and negative outcomes in general, may be differentiated on the basis of regulatory goals (Roese, Hur, & Pennington, 1999), permitting the observation of diverging patterns of activation. In research by Higgins (e.g., 1997) and colleagues, promotion focus was dened as cognitive emphasis on acquisition of positive goals; that is, a concern with advancement, accomplishment, and realization of positive end states. A prevention focus, by contrast, centers on preservation of an absence of unwanted occurrences; that is, a concern with security, protection, and maintenance of the status quo. Promotion failure versus prevention failure evoke qualitatively different affective experiences: dejection and agitation, respectively (Higgins, Shah, & Friedman, 1997). If, as Schwarz and Clore (1996) argued, different kinds of negative affect provide qualitatively different informational insights into goal blockage, then confronting different problems that evoke dejection versus agitation might activate different types of counterfactual thoughts. A preliminary experiment indicated that overall counterfactual activation did not vary as a function of promotion or prevention failure (Pennington & Roese, 2003). Rather, these two types of failure dictated the structural form of counterfactuals: either additions or subtractions. This research was initiated by a puzzle in the counterfactual literature, namely conicting reports as to whether individuals typically wish that they had performed some hypothetical past action (an additive counterfactual) or wish that they had not performed some factual action (a subtractive counterfactual). Thus, an additive counterfactual might be If only Sarah had bought the study guide, she would have performed better on the exam, whereas a subtractive counterfactual might be If only Jack had not been drunk during the exam, he might have performed much better. Initial research by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) supported the latter as the default, whereas various other ndings indicated the reverse (e.g., Roese & Olson, 1993).4 Gilovich and Medvec (1995) demonstrated that temporal perspective moderates the relative frequency of these counterfactual subtypes, with subtractions dominating retrospections of recent events and additions dominating retrospections of long past events. However, as many conicting research ndings centered on the short term, Roese et al. (1999) argued that regulatory focus better accounted for the discrepancy. Specically, additive counterfactuals seemed146 Basic Mechanisms

most prevalent in experiments involving missed opportunities or failed attempts, as in the case of academic (Roese & Olson, 1993) or athletic failure (Grieve, Houston, Dupuis, & Eddy, 1999) (i.e., absence of a positive or promotion failure). By contrast, subtractive counterfactuals seemed most prominent in experiments focusing on sudden accidents or attacks, such as automobile mishaps (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) and sexual assaults (Catellani & Milesi, 2001) (i.e., presence of a negative or prevention failure). In an experiment that presented (on a within-subject basis) descriptions of situations that were examples of such promotion and prevention failures, participants indeed responded with more frequent additive versus subtractive counterfactuals, respectively (Roese et al., 1999, Experiment 1). Thus, ongoing regulatory goals determine the specic form of spontaneously generated counterfactuals. The distinction between dejection and agitation was important as a determinant but not as a consequence of counterfactual activation (Roese et al., 1999). That is, although manipulations of counterfactual thinking produced no differential effects on ratings of dejection versus agitation (Experiment 2), the manipulation of dejection versus agitation activated additive versus subtractive counterfactuals, respectively (Experiment 3). To the extent that dejection and agitation send differential signals regarding promotion failure versus prevention failure, they might differentially activate those counterfactual subtypes best suited to effectively achieve those performance goals. Indeed, Experiment 2 suggested that additive counterfactuals tend to express causal sufciency, whereas subtractive counterfactuals tend to express causal necessity (as indicated by subjects categorizations of their own counterfactuals generated in response to recalled personal experiences). Sufciency is more effective for reaching promotion goals, because one need specify only one action that, in and of itself, will facilitate goal attainment. By contrast, understanding necessity would not be as useful, because such causes may not be enough, in and of themselves, to bring about that desired goal. On the other hand, an understanding of necessity is more parsimonious for reaching prevention goals. With necessity information, the required avenue by which a negative outcome occurs may be eliminated, thereby effectively preventing the outcomes occurrence. An understanding of sufciency would not be as useful in this case, because removing one sufcient cause cannot preclude the operation of other causes that are themselves sufcient to bring about that same undesired outcome. The following example claries these points. If one has the promotion goal of getting to the zoo, one may terminate the search after locating causal sufciency (e.g., nding correct directions to the zoo): One may then walk, cycle, or drive using those roads, and no further causal search for additional roads is needed. Necessity information, on the other hand, does not guarantee achievement of the promotion goal. It may be necessary to travel east in order to reach the zoo from downtown, forThe Mechanics of Imagination 147

example, but traveling east alone does not guarantee arrival at the zoo, thus demanding further search for the correct sequence of roads still needed to attain the goal. Achieving a prevention goal is quite different, as in the goal of preventing oneself from being injured in a bicycle accident. Locating and ruling out one cause sufcient to produce a bicycle accident (e.g., skidding on wet roads, which may be prevented by never cycling during rainy weather) certainly does not preclude the operation of myriad other factors sufcient to induce bicycle accidents (e.g., even when riding in dry weather, drunk drivers, malevolent skateboarders, or sudden gusts of wind can similarly cause accidents). Consideration of causal sufciency within the context of prevention focus demands an exhaustive search for all possible factors sufcient to produce the undesired outcome. But consideration of a cause necessary to produce an unwanted outcome permits the termination of the causal search after identication of just one such factor. If it is necessary to mount a bicycle in the rst place to get into a bicycle accident, for example, one may very easily and effectively prevent the occurrence of bicycle accidents by never going near a bicycle. Thus, sufciency information more effectively services promotion goals, whereas necessity information more effectively services prevention goals. If counterfactuals are usually goal related, one implication is that such thoughts themselves can evoke a particular regulatory focus. In other words, generating a meaningful counterfactual about ones own actions (e.g., I should have locked my car) may temporarily bring to mind a variety of inferences regarding higher order goals (e.g., I need to protect myself from theft). That is, counterfactual thinking can prime goal-oriented modes of processing. Indeed, the experimental induction of additive versus subtractive counterfactuals heightened promotion versus prevention focus, respectively (as indicated by importance ratings of a variety of everyday life goals; Roese et al., 1999, Experiment 2).

SummaryThis section reviewed research on the activation of counterfactual thinking by negative affect, and the linkage of this effect to achievement of performance goals. Further, different kinds of negative affect (dejection versus agitation) are associated with different kinds of goals (promotion versus prevention), and these goals differentially evoke counterfactuals of varying structures (additive versus subtractive), which in turn have varying causal implications (sufciency versus necessity). The additional nding that counterfactuals can stimulate general goal states is perhaps just one manifestation of the more general tendency for counterfactual thinking to prime a mind-set that produces effects independent of the particular counterfactual content.148 Basic Mechanisms

This concept of mind-set priming forms the basis of the nal section of the chapter. In the next section, however, we expand on the contention that goals determine counterfactual activation by considering recent theoretical work on affect goals.

Affect Goals and Counterfactual Activation

That counterfactuals inuence affect was a core feature of the seminal work by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) and the literature it spawned (e.g., Davis & Lehman, 1995; Gleicher et al., 1990; Landman, 1987; Miller & McFarland, 1986; Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994; Zeelenberg et al., 1998). Affect goals, considered in this section, represent the strategic generation of counterfactuals to bring about desired affective states (see Sedikides & Strube, 1997, for review). Sanna (2000) postulated a framework by which automatic versus controlled activation of counterfactual (and also prefactual) thoughts are linked to affect goals. In this section, we present a revised theoretical framework of affect goals that extends prior work while suggesting several directions for future research.

Contrast EffectsBecause evaluative comparisons can produce affective contrast effects, such comparisons may be strategically generated to yield a desired emotional outcome. After skinning her knee, a novice bicyclist might console herself by noting that it could have been worse: She might have fractured a limb. Although counterfactual assimilation effects may sometimes occur (e.g., anxiety produced by vividly imagining a cycling accident that might have occurred; e.g., Markman & McMullen, 2003), contrast effects appear to be the default. Thus, one may generate downward counterfactuals strategically to make oneself feel better (discussed in previous works as the affective function of counterfactuals; e.g., Roese, 1994). Research has indeed shown that counterfactual direction inuences emotion. For example, manipulation of counterfactual direction (by way of encouragement to consider how a recent exam performance might have been better or worse) produced corresponding shifts in self-reported affect (Roese, 1994). Downward counterfactuals made participants feel better, both relative to upward counterfactual consideration and relative to a no-counterfactual control condition (Experiments 1 and 2). Similarly, Olympic silver medalists feel bad because their most salient counterfactual is that they nearly won the gold (an upward comparison), whereas bronze medallists feel much better because their most salient counterfactual is that they might have gone home with no medal at all (a downward comparison; Medvec et al., 1995).The Mechanics of Imagination 149

Subtypes of Affect Goals: A New Framework

Across various literatures in social psychology, three affect goals have been distinguished: mood repair, mood maintenance, and self-protection, each of which may relate uniquely to counterfactual and prefactual thinking (Sanna, 2000; Sanna, Chang, & Meier, 2001). Mood repair refers to strategies designed to improve mood after a negative event has depressed it. Mood maintenance reects the tendency for people to enjoy and thus attempt to preserve good moods. Self-protection is a strategy designed to prepare for future threat by cognitively minimizing its potential impact. In the sections that follow, we present a revised theoretical framework that grounds these three motives to two underlying dimensions, temporal focus and outcome valence. Of course, the axiomatic assumption underlying all such theorizing is that of hedonic regulation: people prefer to feel good rather than bad. By temporal focus, we distinguish between affect goals that are reactive and those which are proactive (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997). In the case of a reactive strategy, a particular outcome has already occurred and cognitive resources are mobilized to confront its aftermath. One may have just had a car accident or just seen a superb lm, and the resulting negative and positive emotions, respectively, impact subsequent affect regulation. By contrast, a proactive strategy is based on forecasting events that have yet to occur and acting in accordance with their expected emotional consequences (see Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998, for examination of biases that accrue from affective forecasting). One may expect to lose money on the stock market or to move to California, and cognitions will change as a function of the expected negative and positive emotional repercussions of these events. Further, by outcome valence, we mean the traditional distinction between events of positive or negative emotional implication, coupled to the traditional assumption that individuals are motivated to approach positive and avoid negative affect. Combining these two dimensions yields a 2 2 framework in which the three affect goals described by Sanna (2000) are rmly ensconced (see table 6.1). The fourth affect goal of free fantasy (proactive/positive), previously articulated in separate theoretical work (Oettingen, 1996; Oettingen, Pak, & Schnetter, 2001), is implied by our framework, constituting an intriguing direction for future integrative research. To summarize, the four goals are as follows. Reactive/Positive In response to a positive outcome, individuals behave in a manner that preserves the positive affect deriving from the outcome. The traditional term for this pattern is mood maintenance. For example, people in happy moods are particular likely to select activities on the basis of whether they will facilitate versus ruin their currently pleasant frame of mind (Wegener & Petty, 1994; Wegener, Petty, & Smith, 1995). With regard to counter150 Basic Mechanisms

factuals, an example of mood maintenance is the observation that people in happy (rather than sad) moods generate relatively greater numbers of downward counterfactuals and report enjoyment in doing so (Sanna, Meier, & Wegner, 2001). Reactive/Negative In response to a negative outcome, individuals behave in a manner that improves upon their current negative affect. The traditional term for this pattern is mood repair. For example, individuals engage in a variety of activities, from outgroup denigration (Fein & Spencer, 1997) to prosocial acts (Schaller & Cialdini, 1990) to make themselves feel better in response to a negative experience. Downward counterfactuals are generated following negative outcomes relatively rarely, but goal-related moderators, such as perceived control (Roese & Olson, 1995b) and self-esteem (Sanna, Turley-Ames, & Meier, 1999) predict their appearance. Proactive/Positive With regard to the prospect of a positive outcome, individuals might actively envision it and thus vicariously enjoy it. Such free fantasies are certainly linked to performance goals, but of interest here is their power to seduce a person to enjoy the desired future in the here and now (Oettingen et al., 2001, p. 737). Evidence that people indulge themselves in such positive fantasies comes from research on goal setting (Oettingen et al., 2001); one example is buying a lottery ticket and enjoying eeting thoughts of yachts and feasts should one hold the winning number (Landman & Petty, 2000). Proactive/Negative In anticipation of the prospect of a negative outcome, individuals might attempt to mitigate the impact of potential negative affect by bracing for the loss (Shepperd, Findley-Klein, Kwavnick, Walker, & Perez, 2000; Shepperd, Ouellette, & Fernandez, 1996). That is, active anticipationThe Mechanics of Imagination 151

renders an outcome more predictable and thus more psychologically manageable. Defensive pessimism is an example of a strategy that provides not only motivational benets (individuals may strive harder to avoid the salient negative prospect) but also affective benets (great predictability reduces the sting of negative outcomes should they actually occur; Norem & Cantor, 1986; Sanna, 1998). Self-handicapping (e.g., Berglas & Jones, 1978), in which individuals intentionally emplace obstacles in their path and thus guarantee failure, is a conceptually similar tactic of threat management. Our present focus is on the manner in which individuals generate upward prefactuals, which clarify strategies that may generally aid performance, and thus similarly help individuals to brace for failure (Sanna, 1999; Sanna & Meier, 2000). This 2 2 framework formalizes predictions as to when counterfactual thinking will be automatic versus controlled. It does so by specifying unique effects with regard to automaticity that occur within each of the four cells as a function of the interplay between three principles. The rst principle is that temporal focus dictates strategic (or motivated) direction of comparison: to produce and/or maintain positive affect, reactive versus proactive strategies favor downward versus upward comparisons, respectively. Specically, affective contrast effects underlie reactive but not proactive affect regulation. Thus, downward counterfactuals are more likely for both reactive/positive (mood maintenance) and reactive/negative (mood repair) affect goals, because for both the contrast-effectinduced positive affect is the strategic goal. By contrast, upward contrasts are more likely for both proactive/positive (free fantasy) and proactive/negative (mood-protection). In the former case, fantasy and daydreams may be marked more by assimilation than contrast effects (cf. Markman & McMullen, 2003; Oettingen et al., 2001; Taylor & Lobel, 1989), and thus the upward prefactual (imagining a better car, employer, or house than is normatively expected) produces positive affect as one languorously elaborates the fantasy. In the latter case of bracing for loss, considering upward alternatives (If only I had more study time, I might be able to do better than expected on tomorrows exam) involves heightened negative affect, but is compensated by consideration of causal explanatory details that render the outcome more predictable, more manageable, and hence less threatening because the possibility of failure was dealt with beforehand. The second principle is that outcome valence dictates the automatic (as opposed to strategic) direction of comparison: positive and negative outcomes tend to evoke downward and upward comparisons, respectively. This pattern was observed when participants were directly probed for counterfactual thoughts (Roese & Olson, 1995b) and when they verbalized freely in response to gambling outcomes (Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993). Response time evidence also supports this contention: Sanna et al. (1999) reported that response latencies were briefest for upward (rather than downward) counterfactual statements following negative affect induction, and for152 Basic Mechanisms

downward (rather than upward) counterfactual statements following positive affect induction. However, open-ended dependent measures indicate that downward counterfactuals are generated spontaneously only rarely (Roese & Olson, 1997), a point to which we return in the general discussion. Even so, anecdotal reports of individuals cheering themselves or others up via thoughts of how things might have been worse (Look on the bright side: You could have been killed, or worse!) suggest the need for actuarial assessments of the frequency with which various counterfactual subtypes are generated across life domains. The third principle, and the key to the pattern of predictions summarized in table 6.1, is that the degree of match between the strategic and the automatic determines the amount of subsequent controlled processing (Sanna, 2000; Sanna, Chang, & Meier, 2001). A match requires no further processing and remains automatic, whereas a mismatch evokes remedial controlled processing that provides a direction of comparison that achieves the strategic goal. Thus, the framework predicts relatively rapid, automatic processing in the case of reactive/positive and proactive/negative affect goals. In the former case, downward counterfactuals are most likely to come to mind automatically, and they are also most desirable in terms of their affective consequences; hence no further controlled processing is required beyond that which is activated automatically. In the latter case, upward prefactuals are most likely to come to mind automatically, and they too are most desirable in their affective consequences, and so, again, no further controlled processing is required. We therefore expect more effortful attempts at affect regulation in the case of both reactive/negative and proactive/positive affect goals, in that these represent mismatches between strategic and automatic thought processes. In the former case, the automatically generated counterfactual is upward (which facilitates achievement of performance goals), whereas the strategically preferred counterfactual (which facilitates affective regulation) is downward, and thus controlled processing would be required to override the automatic to produce a more favorable affective state. In the latter case, downward prefactuals are generated automatically, whereas upward fantasies are the preferred target for affect regulation, and so again controlled processing is invoked to override and replace downward with upward prefactuals. This framework thus provides, within the context of affect regulation, a clear menu of predictions as to when counterfactual activation may be automatic versus controlled.

ments 3 and 4) manipulated mood (positive versus negative) and measured response latencies to counterfactual statements among individuals high and low in self-esteem. The assumption behind this research was that individuals with high (rather than low) self-esteem show a greater tendency to engage in mood-repair activity. Thus, by creating a reactive situation, such individuals might be expected to automatically activate upward counterfactuals, but then to expend relatively greater effort to replace these with positive moodenhancing downward counterfactuals. Results indicated that individuals with high (rather than low) self-esteem indeed generated more downward counterfactual thoughts in response to negative mood and subsequently felt better after doing so. This interpretation is consistent with other research indicating that mood repair is itself an effortful process (e.g., Erber & Erber, 1994), but it also goes even further to suggest why mood repair may be effortful. Unfortunately, no other affect goals were tested by Sanna et al. (1999). A second line of evidence examined three of the four affect goals described here. Sanna, Chang, et al. (2001, Experiment 3) manipulated success versus failure feedback to subjects following completion of a word-association task. Next, subjects made timed agree/disagree judgments about a series of upward or downward counterfactual statements. Further, half of the participants responded to the counterfactual statements while under time pressure, a manipulation designed to illuminate their initial, automatic reactions (Smith & DeCoster, 2000). While responding to the counterfactual statements, participants were asked to consider one of four strategies. Of these four, one was a performance goal and so is not considered further in this section; the other three goals corresponded to cells in table 6.1. In the mood-maintenance condition (reactive/positive), participants considered whether such a thought would help keep your mood at its current level. That is, think about whether having such thoughts would help to maintain your mood. In the moodrepair (reactive/negative) condition, participants considered whether such a thought would help you to feel better. That is, think about whether having such thoughts would help you to improve your mood. Finally, in the selfprotection condition (proactive/negative), participants considered whether such a thought would help you in case you did poorly in the future. That is, consider whether having such thoughts would help to protect your mood. After failure, and with no time pressure, quick responses occurred for upward counterfactuals when self-protection goals were made salient, but slow responses occurred for downward counterfactuals when mood repair was salient. After success and with no time pressure, quick responses occurred for downward counterfactuals when mood maintenance was salient. These ndings correspond to the predicted pattern of automatic versus controlled outcomes in table 6.1. Similar reactions were also obtained with regard to directly manipulated moods and with individual differences in motives (Sanna, Chang, et al., 2001, Experiments 1 and 2). When under time pressure, how154 Basic Mechanisms

ever, participants were quick to agree with upward counterfactuals after failure and downward counterfactuals after success, irrespective of the strategic goal made salient. Thus, upward comparisons after failure and downward after success represents peoples rst, and perhaps most automatic, responses under these conditions. This pattern is also consistent with our prior discussion that contrast effects may be a general default response. When time and effort permit, however, individuals modify their counterfactual responses so as to achieve particular affective goals.

SummaryFour affect goals were considered based on the two underlying dimensions of temporal focus and outcome valence. With regard to affect regulation, two such goals produce relatively automatic activation of counterfactuals, whereas the other two produce more controlled activation of counterfactuals. Three of these four goals have received some attention, but our framework suggests a number of untested implications that may guide future research. First, research has yet to explore the prediction implied by our framework that free fantasies are a controlled process. Second, because negative as opposed to positive affect generally produces stronger effects (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998), we expect that effects depicted in the lower half of table 6.1 will be more powerful than those in the upper half. Indeed, one might argue that the relative paucity of downward counterfactuals spontaneously generated in research by Roese and Olson (1997) is an example of the weakness of effects in the positive/ reactive cell, and that the lack of integrative discussion of positive/proactive goals by Sanna (2000) and others (e.g., Sedikides & Strube, 1997) reects the relative rarity of this type of affect regulation as well. Third, the relation between affect goals and regulatory focus requires further specication; even now, however, it seems clear that mood maintenance and free fantasy are examples of promotion focus, whereas mood repair and self-protection are examples of prevention focus.

Mind-Set PrimingThe previous sections centered on the activation of counterfactuals by goals; we turn now to the activation of goals by counterfactuals. Mind-set priming refers to the activation of higher order goal states by way of prior use of mental procedures related to the goal (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000). For example, comparative assessment of competing strategies versus implementation of a single selected strategy inuences unrelated judgments that reect the continued operation of those deliberative versus implemental mind-sets (GollThe Mechanics of Imagination 155

witzer, Heckhausen, & Steller, 1990; see also Chen, Shechter, & Chaiken, 1996). Two lines of research suggest that counterfactual thinking can have similar mind-set priming effects, in that engaging in counterfactual thinking (a form of mental simulation) in one context might increase the tendency to use mental simulation (e.g., to consider alternatives) in an unrelated context. In the rst line of research, counterfactual thinking was shown to inuence unrelated impression formation; in the second, counterfactual thinking inuenced unrelated problem solving.

Mind-Set Priming and Person Perception

If it is the mere process, as opposed to semantic content, of counterfactual thinking that activates a mind-set marked by heightened consideration of alternatives, then such effects should occur irrespective of the content or direction of comparison of the initial counterfactual inference. To test this, Galinsky, Moskowitz, and Skurnik (2000) employed the standard unrelated studies paradigm, in which primes are incidentally presented in a Study 1 and impressions are assessed in a separate unrelated Study 2. In the priming task, participants read a scenario designed to ignite spontaneous counterfactual thinking (a protagonist either wins or misses out on a contest prize awarded on the basis of seat assignment at a rock concert; the protagonist either did or did not switch her seat from the winning seat or to the winning seat). Participants then completed the Donald impression formation task, with ratings centering on applicable (reckless-adventurous) versus nonapplicable (aloof-independent) trait ascriptions. Priming effects occurred for the former but not the latter: Prior counterfactual activation made Donald appear more reckless to participants; no such effects occurred on judgments of aloofness-independence. Mind-set priming effects were thus limited to applicable judgments. In this particular experiment, recklessness but not aloofness was deemed applicable because the former trait could be more effectively illuminated and elaborated using mental simulation processes, particularly those involving likelihood assessment. In the case of recklessness, the trait itself invites speculation on the calamitous consequences that might follow from irresponsible behavior in various situations. Moreover, if one is forced to interact with a reckless person, assessment of the various potential dangers to oneself would be extremely useful. By contrast, aloofness does not imply the same proliferation of varied problematic consequences across different situations, and so mental simulation would be less useful for elaborating the implications of the trait. Further, these mind-set priming effects were not contingent on the counterfactual primes valence or direction (i.e., upward or downward), indicating

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that it was the process of thinking counterfactually and not the content of the counterfactuals per se that was responsible for the priming effects. Finally, whether participants rated the emotions of the prime scenario character had no reliable effects on impressions, suggesting that the mind-set priming effects were not dependent on drawing attention to the counterfactual emotions (e.g., regret, joy) implied by the scenarios.

Mind-Set Priming and Problem Solving

Priming inuences not only simple judgments, but more complicated inferences and behavior (Bargh, Chen, & Burrow, 1996; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). In the second line of research on mind-set priming, Galinsky and Moskowitz (2000) examined problemsolving effects in three tasks: the Duncker candle problem, the Wason card selection task, and a trait hypothesis-testing task. The Duncker candle problem is an ideal vehicle to investigate counterfactual mind-set priming because solutions to the problem are facilitated by divergent thinking, that is, consideration of alternatives (Glucksberg & Weisberg, 1966; Higgins & Chaires, 1980). In this task, participants are shown a small candle, a full book of matches, and a box lled with thumbtacks. Their instructions are to afx the candle to a cardboard wall such that the candle burns properly and drips no wax on the oor below. The correct solution requires the realization that the box may function as platform as well as container: It may be tacked to a wall to support the candle. Participants tend to focus on the typical, singular function of the box as container. But counterfactuals primed in the same manner as the previous research resulted in dramatic improvement in solution rate (56%) relative to those in the no-prime control condition (6%; Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000, Experiment 1). In this way, a tendency to consider alternatives may have subsequent performance benets for relatively more complex tasks. Counterfactual mind-set activation did not increase attention to all alternatives but only to relevant, even if converse, ones. In another experiment, counterfactual primes attenuated the conrmation bias in trait hypothesis testing by increasing the selection of questions designed to elicit hypothesisdisconrming answers, but without increasing the selection of neutral questions. Thus, counterfactual activation in an unrelated context increased the subsequent attention to an alternative and converse hypothesis (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000, Experiment 3). Counterfactual primes are neutral with regard to content and hence performance: They can both aid and hinder problem solving. In the Wason card selection task, success decreases if too many hypotheses are entertained. In

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the standard version of the task, participants are shown four cards, each bearing an alphanumeric character (e.g., E, K, 4, 7). Participants learn the rule that if a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side and are instructed to select only those cards that must be turned over to verify the rule. Logically, the only two cards that must be selected are the E and 7 cards, because they each may yield falsifying information. An error of commission occurs if the 4 card is turned: it provides no relevant information because the conditional is not bidirectional (i.e., an error termed afrming the consequent). An error of omission occurs when one fails to turn over the 7 card, which could provide falsifying information. Counterfactual primes reduced success at the Wason task in that participants were more likely to make errors of commission, relative to control participants (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000, Experiment 2). This nding reinforces work by Byrne and Tasso (1999), who found that heightened accessibility of alternatives that result from counterfactual conditionals results in fallacious conditional reasoning (e.g., afrming the consequent). However, in the Byrne and Tasso research, the counterfactual premise, afrmations of the consequent, and correct falsications were embedded in the same task. By contrast, Galinsky and Moskowitz separated the counterfactuals from the falsifying task and found that counterfactual primes decreased the rate of solution through the simultaneous selection of the correct falsifying card and incorrect afrmations of the consequent. As in the trait hypothesis-testing experiment, counterfactual primes did not increase the selection of the irrelevant card. Across Galinsky and Moskowitzs three experimental tasks, the priming effects were that participants were only more likely to consider alternatives that were relevant, even if in a contradictory way, to the original hypothesis or function. As in the Galinsky et al. (2000) experiments, direction of the counterfactual primes did not moderate the effects on the problem-solving tasks. In general, priming effects reect the impact of incidental exposure on what we think, whereas mind-set priming illustrates the additional impact of priming on how we think.

SummaryThis section addressed the broader issue of how counterfactuals relate to goal execution, even for goals unrelated to the counterfactual activation. A counterfactual mind-set makes individuals more likely to consider alternatives, a tendency that can have a variety of consequences for social perception and problem solving. In the nal section, we summarize the ideas in this chapter, explore a few new ideas, and consider directions for future research.

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General DiscussionWe have discussed two types of goals, performance and affect, as determinants of counterfactual activation, then reviewed evidence for counterfactuals as mind-set primes. In addition, we have presented a revised framework for classifying affect goals on the basis of underlying dimensions of temporal focus and outcome valence. As discussed next, research supporting these ideas claries and updates our understanding of the mechanics of imagination, but also ignites new questions deserving further research.

Downward CounterfactualsA focal controversy centers on the two-stage models assertion that upward counterfactuals and their power to serve performance goals represent the automatic default, whereas downward counterfactuals are constructed only rarely and effortfully. Our discussion of affect goals updates this contention by asserting that both upward and downward counterfactuals may be the automatic default or the controlled override, depending on the nature of the outcome and the affect goal that is currently active. Nevertheless, questions of the relative frequency of downward counterfactuals remain unresolved, and more deeply reect the issue of the overall frequency of motives aimed at performance versus affect regulation. Available evidence is equivocal. On one hand, upward counterfactuals are spontaneously mentioned (in response to open-ended thought listings) after failure but not success, with downward counterfactuals appearing infrequently (Roese & Hur, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997). However, this research has been limited to assessments within achievement domains, and it may be argued that such domains by denition inspire greater attention to performance than affect goals. On the other hand, success (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000; Markman et al., 1993) or good moods (Sanna et al., 1999; Sanna, Meier, et al., 2001) can evoke spontaneous downward counterfactual thinking, but because these latter demonstrations were also largely rooted in achievement, variation in judgment domain cannot account for the disparity in ndings. One possible resolution rests on the regulatory focus perspective (Higgins, 1997): Prevention rather than promotion goals evoke more frequent downward counterfactuals. But even in research examining this connection (again conducted within achievement domains), relatively few examples of downward counterfactuals are observed (Hur, 2000). A more satisfying resolution is that measurement strategy (i.e., whether counterfactuals are measured using open-ended thought listings or direct solicitations) explains some of these discrepant ndings. Generally speaking, ab-

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sence of counterfactuals following success is observed with the former strategy (e.g., Roese & Hur, 1997), and prevalence of downward counterfactuals following success is observed with the latter strategy (e.g., Grieve et al., 1999; Roese & Olson, 1993, 1995b, 1997; Sanna, Meier, & Turley-Ames, 1998; Sanna & Turley, 1996; Sanna et al., 1999).5 But contrary to this pattern, Markman et al. (1993) found substantial downward counterfactual thinking in response to an open-ended, oral think aloud measure. Further, Medvec et al. (1995) found that bronze-medal winners spontaneously consider downward counterfactuals (e.g., At least I got a medal) and Medvec and Savitsky (1997) showed that downward counterfactuals may be spontaneously considered when people barely surpass a threshold to obtain a desired outcome (e.g., I almost didnt make the grade). Moreover, these downward counterfactuals may themselves have motivational implications (McMullen & Markman, 2000): For example, recognition that investment decisions might have resulted in substantial losses constituted a wake-up call that prompted subsequent preventive behavior. Finally, the repeated observation of stronger effects involving negative valence than those of positive valence (Baumeister et al., 2001) suggests that any effects of positive valence will be weaker, even if measurable, than those of negative valence. It is clear, however, that at present we can offer no single resolution to these discrepant ndings. Thus, questions of the frequency of downward counterfactual thinking, and the relative frequency with which performance versus affect goals dominate everyday cognition, remain open to further inquiry.

Rhetorical GoalsAlthough this chapter focuses on performance and affect goals, research has elaborated on other goals, such as those embracing persuasion and rhetoric. Counterfactuals can be persuasive, in that they can dramatize and illuminate arguments in a particularly vivid manner. The speculation of what life in North America might be like under Nazi rule had the Germans won World War II is far more interesting, arousing, and dramatic than a semantically similar actualist account of the causal determinants and aftermath of the outcome of that war. Scholarly examinations of historical events that are explicitly counterfactual (e.g., Cowley, 2000; Tetlock & Belkin, 1996) benet from this vividness, as do the plethora of popular novels that are collectively termed alternate history (see http://www.uchronia.net for bibliography). Roese and Olson (1995a) argued that counterfactuals could be rhetorically illuminating when they draw contrasts that selectively highlight specic attributes (e.g., downward historical counterfactuals can make salient positive aspects of contemporary American life, such as civil liberties, whereas upward counterfactuals make shortcomings more salient, such as uneven160 Basic Mechanisms

health care availability). Tetlock (1998) showed that individuals strategically generate counterfactuals to preserve their beliefs. For example, conservative political theorists selectively argued that the 1991 Soviet coup attempt almost succeeded, which would have perpetuated the cold war in a manner compatible with their anti-Soviet belief system. Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, and Lerner (2000) further demonstrated that individuals defend against the threat embodied by heretical counterfactuals with metaphorical moral cleansing or heightened declarations of moralistic belief. In one study, fundamentalist Christians reacted with disgust and moral outrage to suggestions that the sequence of events in Christs life and mission might have been altered by accidental circumstance, for example, if Jesus had given in to one of the devils temptations during his fast of 40 days and nights in the wilderness (p. 864). These varied research projects converge on the conclusion that counterfactuals may be employed in the service of effortful rhetorical goals, designed either to defend ones own beliefs or to proselytize others.

Counterfactual Automaticity Reconsidered

Some provisional conclusions regarding the automaticity of counterfactual thinking are rooted in Barghs (1994) four horsemen framework. The view inherent in the two-stage model (Roese & Olson, 1997) is that counterfactual thinking is typically automatic in the postconscious sense, meaning that it is contingently evoked by recognition of negative valence associated with a target outcome. The present review suggests that this view is overly limited, and that counterfactual thinking also operates via goal-dependent automaticity, in that efcient problem solving, performance enhancement, and affective coping may develop from intentional, deliberative thought that over repeated experience becomes automated (Kahneman, 1995). The pervasiveness of counterfactual thinking stems from its functionality with regard to goaldirected behavior, and it is a mind-set that persists over time to affect unrelated judgments because it is a well-learned functional strategy for comprehending the world. The issue of awareness is less interesting with respect to counterfactual automaticity, in that individuals are nearly always conscious of the evoking outcome and usually of the production of counterfactual thoughts. More to the point, we suspect that individuals are often well aware of the connection between the two. Thus, when a gambler kicks herself for not having made a different bet, she will likely admit (and regard it as obvious) that this regret is contingent on the loss just suffered. Nevertheless, future research might employ a sequential priming paradigm to investigate whether counterfactuals can be subliminally primed (e.g., with extreme negative words presented parafoveally for brief intervals). Such a research program might inform us as to whether it is possible for counterfactuals to beThe Mechanics of Imagination 161

activated without awareness of the evoking circumstance, but we assume that even if such effects can occur, they do so only rarely in everyday life. However, counterfactual activation can have unintended consequences that occur without awareness. In the Galinsky et al. (2000) experiments, none of the participants reported that the prime scenarios impacted their subsequent performance. Although the generation of counterfactual thoughts is almost conscious, individuals are perhaps rarely aware that counterfactuals, once activated, may affect their later judgments. Counterfactuals may be generated with or without intention, and this marks the heart of the distinction between automatic versus controlled processes that we have discussed. Counterfactual thinking may be efcient, in that cognitive load apparently interferes with corrections for impact of counterfactual inferences but not with the inferences themselves (Goldinger et al., 2003). One suggestion noted here is that upward but not downward counterfactuals are efcient, as the latter but not the former are disrupted by cognitive load, at least under negative event conditions (Sanna et al., 1999). Furthermore, upward counterfactuals that are additive versus subtractive do not vary in efciency, as cognitive load produced neither interruption nor variation in the frequency with which these two upward counterfactual subtypes are generated (Roese & Hur, 1998). Finally, counterfactuals are controllable (i.e., suppressable) once activated, and indeed those that are activated automatically may constitute the launchpad for further elaborative processing (Sanna et al., 1999; Sanna, Chang, et al., 2001). In our discussion of affect goals, we argued that a mismatch (as opposed to a match) between the direction of the counterfactual that is automatically generated versus the direction of the counterfactual that best fullls a particular affect goal results in the initiation of more controlled processing. The result of that controlled processing, as discussed in this chapter, is a counterfactual that aids in affect. This, of course, does not preclude the possibility of controlled processing resulting from mismatches involving other goals, such as those involving performance (Sanna, Chang, et al., 2001).

ConclusionWhen Hofstadter (1979) argued that any articial intelligence capable of consciousness must necessarily rest on the capacity to generate counterfactuals, he hinted at the manner in which our essential understanding of reality, our science and our art, our very mental existence, emerge from the ability to draw comparisons from mentally constructed benchmarks. Counterfactual thinking, seen in this light, becomes a lynchpin of human consciousness. A central theme of the last century, extending from Einstein to postmodernism to the psychology of injustice, is that all is relative.6 In purely psychological162 Basic Mechanisms

terms, one might argue that all judgment is relative, each occurring with respect to referents, be they representations of concrete objects or implicit summaries of prior frequency. If this is so, then a key function of brains is to constantly retrieve and construct representations that act as benchmarks for the online evaluation of currently active percepts. Many benchmarks might be recruited implicitly, but only a fraction may emerge into conscious thought. Counterfactuals are more than standards of comparison; they are full-blown mental scenarios of often striking vividness. Counterfactuals may be the conscious tip of a vast iceberg of competing judgmental standards that are collectively essential for basic comprehension and imaginative insight.

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH55578 awarded to N. J. Roese and a Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to L. J. Sanna.

Notes1. This quotation is taken slightly out of context. The focus of the assertion is synthesis, which is then characterized as the mere operation of the imagination (Kant, 1781/1990, p. 60). 2. Gamblers betting on football outcomes were vastly more likely to imagine how a bet might have gone differently following a loss than a win (Gilovich, 1983, Experiment 1). To our knowledge, this is the rst demonstration that counterfactual activation is valence dependent. 3. Olson et al. (2000) argued that counterfactuals and social comparisons are related more deeply than previously assumed. They argued that the typical effect of an upward social comparisonnegative affectis mediated by a counterfactual construction in which the self is transplanted into the shoes of the comparison target: That could have been me! (p. 393). Evidence for this mediating relation has yet to appear. 4. See Pennington and Roese (2003) for a full review of relevant studies. 5. Experiments reported by both Roese and Olson (1997) and Sanna and Turley (1996) included a direct manipulation of counterfactual assessment format that revealed this pattern. 6. Johnson (2001) argued that relativism, in all its myriad forms, was the signature intellectual development of the twentieth century.

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7Compensatory Automaticity: Unconscious Volition Is Not an OxymoronJack Glaser and John F. Kihlstrom

After nearly three decades of research on automaticity and construct activation, it is increasingly clear that much of human mental life operates without awareness or intent. In the literature of cognitive psychology, automatic processes are held to be inevitably evoked by the presence of a relevant environmental stimulus; once triggered, their execution proceeds rapidly, effortlessly, and incorrigibly to completion, leaving no traces accessible to conscious recollection. The concept of automaticity, long central in cognitive psychology (e.g., Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977), has come to occupy an important place in social psychology as well (e.g., Bargh, 1994, 1997; Kihlstrom, 1996, 1999; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). At the same time, some of the features canonically attributed to automaticity have been called into question (e.g., Logan, 1997; Shiffrin, 1997), and newer research reveals that automatic responses, while unintended, may not be inevitable (e.g., Glaser, 2003; Glaser & Banaji, 1999; Moskowitz, 2001; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999). It appears that unconscious vigilance for bias can lead to corrective processes that also operate without conscious awareness or intent. Given these developments, we contend that the unconscious, in addition to being a passive categorizer, evaluator, and semantic processor, has processing goals (e.g., accuracy, egalitarianism) of its own, can be vigilant for threats to the attainment of these goals, and will proactively compensate for such threats. One might call this compensatory automaticity; strategic yet nonconscious compensations for unintended thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. For some, this will pose a paradox because automaticity has been equated with lack of control or intent. We believe, however, that it is important at this stage to move beyond that conation and to entertain the possibility that intention operates at multiple levels of consciousness. There can be nonconscious intentions (e.g., goals) that, when the potential for their imminent frustration becomes evident,171

automatic compensatory processes will promote and protect. All of this can operate outside of conscious awareness and control, thereby rendering the unconscious relatively complete, although not, of course, the entirety of mental life.

The Unconscious and the Triarchic Mind

Arguments that the unconscious is complex and wide ranging have been made compellingly, and with increasing empirical support, for several decades. It is probably not a coincidence that the person who wrote denitively about the mental trilogy of affect, cognition, and conation (Hilgard, 1980) also conducted groundbreaking work on the complexity of the unconscious, even arguing that the unconscious is comprised of multiple levels of awareness (Hilgard, 1977). Hilgards (1977) research revealed that percepts not available to conscious recollection could nevertheless guide a person in a nonconscious, hypnotic state. Most important to the present thesis, Hilgard provided evidence of divided consciousness and specically the concept of the hidden observer, wherein a hypnotized subject was able to perceive and respond to auditory instruction even while otherwise deaf by hypnotic suggestion and accordingly nonresponsive to startling noises. Partly inspired by Hilgards (1977) insights, Kihlstrom (1987) made the case that the cognitive unconscious was expansive and sophisticated. At the time that Kihlstrom rst argued that a modern, cognitive conception of the unconscious was likely to be wide ranging, evidence was concentrated on the cognitive component of the mind, with ample demonstrations of implicit memory and automatic cognition (e.g., Neely, 1977; Schacter, 1987; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Unconscious affect and motivation were, for the most part, theoretical constructs with smatterings of empirical support. But the early trickle of research on unconscious affect (e.g., Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980; Zajonc, 1980), gave way to a steady ow in the late 1980s with Fazios (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986) demonstration that evaluative responses can occur automatically, and Barghs (Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996) extension that this automatic evaluation was a highly general phenomenon. Greenwald (Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996; Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989) as well as Niedenthal (1990) and Murphy and Zajonc (1993) made a convincing case for unconscious affective responses, demonstrating that they occurred even for stimuli that were subliminal and therefore not consciously perceived (see Kihlstrom, Mulvaney, Tobias, & Tobis, 2000, for a review). In recent years, unconscious goals and motives have also appeared on the radar screen (e.g., McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). Bargh and his172 Basic Mechanisms

colleagues (e.g., Bargh, 1996, 1997; Bargh & Barndollar, 1996; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996), in particular, have brought their research to bear to make the compelling argument that all major mental processes, including motivation (see also Gollwitzer, 1999), can operate automatically. Most recently, Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, and Trotschel (2001) have demonstrated that noncon scious goal pursuits possess properties similar to those deemed fundamental to conscious motivation, specically, vigorous action toward goal satisfaction, persistence, and resumption after disruption. Although to date less comprehensive than the research on unconscious cognition and affect, their work strongly indicates that goals and behaviors can also be activated automatically and will be pursued nonconsciously. If, as theorists (e.g., Bargh, 1997; Hilgard, 1977; Kihlstrom, 1987, 1999) have suggested for decades, nonconscious mental life is sophisticated and comprehensive, we must entertain the possibility that in addition to the trilogy of affect, cognition, and conation being represented there, another critical aspect of human psychology, self-awareness and metacognition, may also reside outside of consciousness. The very terms self-awareness and metacognition, raised in the context of the unconscious, will likely raise consternation among those who, for good reason, equate awareness with consciousness. The very absence of a term like awareness or introspection in the lexicon of the study of the unconscious is a testament to the prevalence of the belief that nonconscious processes operate outside any monitoring capability. Hilgard (1977) questioned this rigidity with his concept of the hidden observer, but to date the idea is still counterintuitive, and we are left to ponder the oxymoronic nature of the proposition. Nevertheless, evidence for the apparent automatic control, or attempts at control, of automatic processes (e.g., Glaser, 2003; Glaser & Banaji, 1999; Moskowitz, 2001; Moskowitz et al., 1999), leads us to theorize that people are capable of nonconscious vigilance for nonconscious bias and further of automatic compensatory processes that are triggered outside of conscious awareness or control. Evidence for this comes from developments in the priming literature, specically with regard to assimilation and contrast in construct activation and stereotype suppression effects. These ndings are discussed as they relate to compensatory automaticity and unconscious volition.

The Role of Awareness in Construct Activation and Inhibition

Research on construct activation (Higgins, 1996; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977) has been guided to some extent by the assumption that unconscious/ automatic processes lead to assimilation effects while more deliberate proCompensatory Automaticity 173

cesses, such as correction, lead to contrast. Lombardi, Higgins, and Bargh (1987), for example, reported that subjects were likely to judge an ambiguous target person in a manner consistent with a construct (e.g., stubborn or persistent) that was made accessible (an assimilation effect), if the priming event presenting the construct was not explicitly remembered. If, on the other hand, the priming event was remembered at all, the target person was judged in a manner inconsistent with the construct (a contrast effect). Lombardi et al. attributed this difference to distinctions between automatic and controlled processingautomatic processes accounting for assimilation, and controlled processes engendering contrast. Support for the role of awareness and deliberation in determining assimilation versus contrast also comes from a study by Martin, Seta, and Crelia (1990). Theorizing that contrast effects result from an overgeneralization in attempts to counteract the biasing inuence of priming stimuli (Martin, 1986), Martin et al. hypothesized that this would be most likely to occur when one has the cognitive resources to make such an adjustment, but not when such resources are depleted (a limitation to which automatic processes are, by the way, immune). Accordingly, they found that distracted subjects showed assimilation toward primed concepts, while those who were not distracted showed contrast. Martin et al. corroborated this nding by reporting similar effects for subjects who were low and high in need for cognition, respectively. Similarly, Newman and Uleman (1990) found that contrast effects occurred when primes were blatant, and Strack, Schwarz, Bless, Kubler, and Wanke (1993) reported that subjects who were reminded of a priming procedure showed contrast effects, whereas those who were not reminded exhibited assimilation. It appears from the research described that the salience of the prime, to the extent that salience is related to awareness, may determine whether priming is assimilative or contrastive. One determinant of salience is extremity. Indeed, Herr, Sherman, and Fazio (1983; see also Herr, 1986), studied the effects of extremely large or small (and, in another experiment, ferocious and meek) animal primes on judgments of the size (or ferocity) of target animals. They found that extreme primes yielded contrastive judgments, whereas moderate primes led to assimilative judgments of an ambiguous target. Taken together, the results of such experiments suggest that as the priming stimulus, or at least its potential to inuence the judgment of the target, becomes more salient, and therefore more accessible to conscious awareness, contrast effects in judgments are more likely to result. The effect of prime salience on assimilation and contrast effects may be moderated by the motivation to be accurate, which, not surprisingly, inuences how judgments are made (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987). In fact, in one of their experiments, Martin et al. (1990) found that subjects who believed that

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their judgments would be averaged with those of others made assimilative responses, whereas those who believed that their judgments would be evaluated individually exhibited contrast effects, most likely attempting to compensate, but regrettably overcompensating, for the biasing effect of the prime. This result suggests, consistent with other research on accountability and accuracy (e.g., Lerner & Tetlock, 1999), that anticipated accountability motivated subjects to be vigilant and adjust for the biasing inuence of the primes. Other studies have more directly manipulated accuracy motivation, nding that it attenuates assimilation effects (Ford & Kruglanski, 1995; Thompson, Roman, Moskowitz, Chaiken, & Bargh, 1994). Stapel, Koomen, and Zeelenberg (1998) have drawn upon such ndings to make the case that accuracy motivation leads to more careful processing of the target, thereby attenuating assimilation effects, but that a correction strategy is required to bring about contrast effects. Of most relevance to the present thesis, Stapel, Martin, and Schwarz (1998) have shown that the corrections that engender contrast effects are made spontaneously when biasing information is blatant, but not when it is subtle. Such corrections would almost certainly be dependent on an accuracy goal (in the absence of such a goal, why would one correct for biasing information?). Correction has also been posited as a determinant of both contrast and assimilation effects by Petty and Wegener (1993; Wegener & Petty, 1995), who provide evidence that peoples lay theories about assimilation and contrast predict the direction of their corrections for the potential biasing effects of contextual stimuli. Specically, in Petty and Wegeners studies, subjects who expected assimilation effects corrected away from the direction of the contextual information (i.e., the priming stimulus) while those who expected contrast effects corrected toward the contextual information. These ndings convey the complexity of perceivers strategies when they attempt to mitigate the effects of judgmental biases. In sum, a substantial body of research indicates that while contextual information can bias a response to supposedly unrelated stimuli, at times the result shows a contrastive pattern. It appears that contrast effects occur especially when the perceiver is aware of the potential biasing inuence of the prime, perhaps as a result of its salience, and/or when the perceiver has the cognitive resources and motivation to recognize or remember the prime. It also appears to be the case that, while assimilation effects occur spontaneously, contrast effects are more likely the result of an active correction. To date, studies of contrast effects have been restricted to conditions under which judgments are relatively controlled and deliberate (e.g., rating a target stimulus on a scale). Perhaps this is the case because of the assumption that contrast effects result from deliberate processes (e.g., Lombardi et al., 1987; Wilson & Brekke, 1994). Given that assumption, one would expect to see only

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assimilation effects in automatic processing. However, the results of recent research provide clear evidence, apparently the rst, of what might be called contrast effects under conditions where controlled processing is precluded, thus suggesting an automatic correction process. The evidence for automatic correction calls into question prevailing conceptions of unconscious processes as passive and reactive, and therefore warrants further examination.

Reverse Priming: Automatic Correction for Automatic Evaluation

Fazio et al. (1986) rst demonstrated automatic evaluation (aka automatic attitude activation, affective priming) using a semantic priming procedure in which research subjects categorized target adjectives as being positive or negative. The presentation of each target was preceded by the presentation of another word (a prime) that was either positive or negative (evaluatively neutral nonword letter strings were also used as primes). Responses were faster when the prime and target in a given pair were evaluatively congruent. This necessarily indicated that the primes had been evaluated too. Prior research on automaticity had shown that when the time from the onset of the prime to the onset of the target, otherwise known as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), was brief (e.g., under 500 ms), the effects of controlled processes on priming effects could be precluded (Neely, 1977). Fazio et al. (1986), employing a 300 ms SOA, made a strong case that the evaluations of the primes were automatic and unintended. Furthermore, comparisons with response times when the prime was neutral revealed that subjects were evaluating both the positive and negative primes, which were having facilitative and inhibitory effects on responses to evaluatively congruent and incongruent targets, respectively. Bargh and colleagues (1992) expanded on this nding, demonstrating that automatic evaluation is a very general phenomenon that occurs even for objects toward which attitudes are weak. Further, Bargh et al. (1996) employed more subtle techniques, including the mere pronunciation, rather than evaluative categorization, of the targets, to make a compelling case that automatic evaluation occurs very spontaneously and relatively unconditionally (see also Hermans, de Houwer, & Eelens, 1994). In the absence of cues that the experiment was about evaluating the stimuli, and the consequent elimination of corresponding demand characteristics, Bargh et al. (1996) obtained robust automatic evaluation effects (i.e., faster pronunciation of targets preceded by evaluatively congruent primes) for both weak and strong attitude objects. Inspired by the effectiveness of the Bargh et al. (1996) procedure, Glaser and Banaji (1999) set out to adapt the paradigm to measure implicit race

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prejudice unobtrusively. Researchers had previously employed similar procedures to measure racial bias (e.g., Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995), but such procedures, involving judgments about the valence or category of the target, while effectively nonreactive, were relatively obtrusive. With the use of a pronunciation, rather than an evaluation or a categorization task, subjects would be unlikely to presume the procedure was designed to assess their racial attitudes. Glaser and Banaji (1999) expanded the stimulus categories beyond those of Bargh et al. (1996) to include words and names that are stereotypically associated with African American and European American culture (e.g., basketball, homeboy, Cosby; and golf, hippies, Letterman). In addition, they used a list of extremely positive and negative but race-neutral words (e.g., kindness, puppy, accident, tumor) termed generic stimuli, and another set of raceneutral positive and negative words that were all related to food (e.g., fudge, soup, beets, meatloaf).1 Pairing these categories of words in all possible types of combinations allowed for a test for automatic evaluation (race-neutral primes with race-neutral targets), race categorization (race primes with race targets), and race prejudice (race-neutral primes with race targets, or vice versa), and further enhanced the unobtrusiveness of the measure by lending the appearance of true arbitrariness. These multiple possible outcomes within one paradigm also promised to bolster the internal validity of the ndings. For example, if race-neutral (i.e., generic or food) primes and targets produced automatic evaluation effects (e.g., faster responding to positive-positive and negative-negative prime-target pairs), and race primes and targets produced race categorization effects (e.g., faster responding to Black-Black and WhiteWhite pairings) that would support the interpretation of an interaction of race-neutral primes with race targets (e.g., faster responding to negativeBlack and positive-White than to negative-White and positive-Black primetarget pairings) as reecting prejudice (i.e., an association between evaluations and groups). Indeed, all three types of unconscious association were evident with both types of race-neutral stimuli (generic and food), and the effects tended to be large. However, when the generic words served as primes, the results were counterintuitive and perplexing. The effects were in the opposite direction of what had been predicted and of what had been obtained on trials where the food words served as primes. Specically, on trials where the generic words served as primes, subjects were faster to respond to evaluatively incongruent targets than to the congruent targets. Similarly, regarding the test for automatic prejudice, with the food primes subjects were faster to pronounce Black-associated and White-associated targets when preceded by negative and positive primes, respectively, indicating the predicted pro-White or antiBlack bias. However, as with the automatic evaluation effect, the opposite

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was true for generic primes, giving the impression of an anti-White/pro-Black bias that might have been interpreted as such had it not been for the similar pattern of results observed with the race-neutral stimuli in the automatic evaluation analysis. Glaser and Banaji (1999) dubbed the effect reverse priming because the priming effect was the reverse of what one would expect. Importantly, these reverse priming effects were very large and highly statistically signicant. Furthermore, careful inspection of the data revealed that virtually all subjects showed this pattern, and that the pattern of results was very consistent across trials, with subjects showing reverse priming with generic primes, and normal priming with food primes in the early, middle, and late phases of the task. The inferential statistical tests were, accordingly, very conclusive. Consequently, despite having predicted otherwise, Glaser and Banaji were not inclined to dismiss the nding as random. Clearly, something interesting was happening in the automatic evaluation evidenced in this study, as a function of the type of prime. What was it about the food and generic words that led to such dramatically different patterns? One thing that was evident immediately was that the food and the generic words differed in evaluative extremity. Because food words are unlikely to be extremely negative (anything that is extremely aversive is probably not edible, or at least not considered a food), and because the negative and positive words were selected to be balanced on evaluative extremity, the food words tended to be only mildly valenced (averaging 1.0 for negative and +1.03 for positive food words on an 11-point evaluation scale from 5 to +5). In contrast, the generic words, selected to be unambiguously positive or negative, were fairly extreme in valence (3.7 and +3.85). Evaluative extremity seemed a likely candidate for the critical difference between the food and generic words. Indeed, subsequent, post hoc analyses revealed that the most extremely valenced subset of the generic primes showed an even more exaggerated reverse priming effect, while the least extreme of them (still considerably more extreme than the food primes) showed a at lineno priming effect at all. The post hoc analyses were suggestive, but a priori replication was required to isolate prime extremity as a determinant of reverse priming. Accordingly, Glaser and Banaji replicated this experiment selecting new race-neutral stimuli that varied only in evaluative extremity, to replace the generic and food words. The results (see gure 7.1) matched those of the rst experiment almost precisely, with mild (instead of food) primes leading to normal effects and extreme (instead of generic) primes yielding reversed effects (Glaser & Banaji, 1999, Experiments 2 and 3). Nevertheless, the reverse priming effect was counterintuitive, and so Glaser and Banaji (1999) sought to identify other conditions that gave rise to it.

Most prominently, it seemed possible that the presence of the racial stimuli in the procedure caused subjects to react in an unusual, perhaps acutely selfconscious manner, even on trials where there were no racial stimuli, when prime and target were race neutral, as with the data presented in gure 7.1. A series of three experiments (Glaser & Banaji, 1999, Experiments 4, 5, and 6) excluded racial stimuli from the procedure and also tested the effects of procedural variables, such as stimulus presentation durations and the presence of an orienting stimulus prior to each prime, in an effort to rule out obscure procedural variants as explanations for reverse priming. While replications of the experiment without any racial stimuli revealed that the racial stimuli did make a difference, it was not with regard to reverse priming. As gure 7.2 illustrates, whereas with racial stimuli present (see gure 7.1) normal priming was evident with mild primes and reverse priming with extreme primes, in the absence of racial stimuli, there was no longer any priming effect with the mild primes, but with the extreme primes the reverse priming effect was still evident. We can only speculate at this stage, but it seems plausible that the presence of the racial stimuli served to enhance the salience of the evaluative aspect of the stimuli, thereby enabling even mild primes to activate an associated attitude. Importantly, though, reverse priming (i.e., priming in the opposite direction of that predicted given the valence of the prime) persisted, as before, when the primes were evaluatively extreme, across various samples, stimulus sets, and procedures.

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Automatic Correction for Unintended Bias

We propose that the observed reverse priming effects reect a correction that is instigated by the perceived potential of the peripheral prime to bias the response to the intended target. The task is to pronounce the target word correctly. In an orthographically deep (i.e., nonphonetic) language like English, this very likely involves processing the targets meaning, which includes, perhaps centrally, its evaluative valence (i.e., whether it is good or bad) (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957; Tesser & Martin, 1996). When an extraneous stimulus (the prime) that is particularly obtrusive (by virtue of its evaluative extremity) appears, the perceiver is all the more likely to recognize its potential to bias the response (i.e., the identication of meaning and resultant correct pronunciation) to the intended target of judgment. If the strategy employed were simply to disregard or actively inhibit the prime, we would see no priming effect at all. However, the consistently obtained reverse priming effects indicate that an unconscious, but tactical correction is taking place in order to neutralize the threat to the accuracy of the intended response. As is the case with more deliberate judgments (e.g., Lombardi et al., 1987; Martin et al., 1990; Stapel et al., 1998), the compensatory process is excessive; an overcompensation. As a result, the extreme primes end up activating the evaluative associations that are opposite to that of their intrinsic meaning and consequently facilitate responses to words of opposite valence, and perhaps inhibit responses to words of the same valence.180 Basic Mechanisms

Correction or Comparison?The effect of prime extremity, yielding reverse priming, is reminiscent of the ndings of Herr et al. (1983), wherein extreme primes led to contrast effects. Such contrast effects are typically attributed to comparison-contrast, wherein the judgment of the target is contrasted away from a presumably irrelevant prime or comparison standard (Sherif & Hovland, 1961), and this could be the case with Herr et al. (1983) as well. Thoughts of extremely large (small) animals may have made target animals of an ambiguous size seem small (large) by comparison. Such an explanation is not, however, likely for Glaser and Banajis (1999) reverse priming results, for several reasons. First, we must consider that the dependent variable was reaction time to pronounce the target word, not a qualitative judgment (e.g., evaluative rating, or size or weight estimation) of the target as employed in typical studies of comparisoncontrast. In order for comparison-contrast to explain the reverse priming results in a reaction time paradigm, we would have to allow that, after seeing an extreme prime, the subject judges the target in the opposite direction of the prime (via comparison, e.g., Compared to a tumor, war isnt such a bad thing), and then the automatic activation process has to start all over (with the newly contrasted target), yielding differential activation. In other words, in a two-stage priming process, the prime and target would both be perceived, and then the judgment of the target would have to be radically adjusted for its comparative relation to the prime, such that it is now perceived to have the opposite valence of what it normatively has. Subsequent to that adjustment, the response to the newly adjusted (in terms of evaluation) target would be either facilitated or inhibited by the prime. Not only is this explanation awkward and unparsimonious, it also predicts that all targets, or at least all mildly valenced targets, would be contrasted by extreme primes (those that are similar and different in valence alike). This would yield relatively slow responses to all targets following extreme primes, not just those targets of similar valence to the prime. In all the Glaser and Banaji (1999) experiments, priming with extreme primes was characterized by slower responses to evaluatively congruent (e.g., positive-positive and negative-negative) primetarget pairs. Perhaps more profoundly, the comparison-contrast explanation ts poorly in this context because the reverse priming effects, while limited to trials withCompensatory Automaticity 181

evaluatively extreme primes, were obtained for trials with evaluatively extreme as well as moderate targets. The primes and targets were drawn from the same pool of words (although the same word was never presented with itself as prime and target in the same or even a proximal trial). It is unlikely that the comparison of extreme targets to equally extreme primes would yield comparison contrast, since, by virtue of their equality, there is no basis for contrasting one with the other. Finally, another comparison with Herr et al.s (1983) ndings is illuminating. They found assimilation effects only when the targets were ambiguous (i.e., ctitious animals). When targets were unambiguous (real animals), contrast effects occurred with moderate and extreme primes alike. If the comparison-contrast explanation typically applied to Herr et al.s results applies to the reverse priming ndings, we would expect to see contrast effects when the prime is moderate and the target is extreme (i.e., unambiguous). Again, this is not the case, and correction is therefore a more plausible explanation. In fact, it is difcult to envision how comparison-contrast could explain any priming effect with a reaction-time-dependent variable. It is for this reason that we have been careful to adhere to the term reverse priming and to endorse a correction explanation, so as to avoid confusion with comparisoncontrast. While there are some striking parallels to research on assimilation and contrast, and specically comparison-contrast (e.g., the Herr et al. ndings), the relation appears to be more one of analogy than similarity. For the reasons stated above, the cause of the reversal of the priming effect appears to lie in the response to the prime alone, not the comparison of the prime and target. While reverse priming results in what may look like a contrast effect, because the hypothesized underlying mechanism, correction, is distinct from comparison, we are careful not to call this a contrast effect, lest it be confused with the more commonplace comparison-contrast effects.

Unconscious Volition?If the reverse priming effects do represent an automatic correction, they provide evidence for a complex, sophisticated, and even volitional unconscious. Not only are subjects spontaneously correcting for an unwanted bias, they are doing so in the context of having no conscious awareness of the potential for bias. Because of the unobtrusiveness of the procedure (e.g., due to the use of the pronunciation task and the generic, nonsensitivei.e., not racerelatednature of the stimuli), subjects do not even know that they are evaluating the targets, let alone the primes, or that they might respond faster when the prime and target are evaluatively congruent. Discussions with subjects during debrieng conrmed this lack of awareness. The goal to pronounce the target accurately may well be a deliberate one,182 Basic Mechanisms

given that the experiment instructions demand as much. The goal to evaluate the target, however, and any intention to correct for threats to such a goal, would almost certainly have to be unconscious, because participants are unaware and unlikely to infer that evaluative priming is the subject of the experiment. Furthermore, the use of short SOAs (150 and 300 ms), coupled with relatively short mean response times (approximately 550 ms), make it almost certain that latencies to respond to the targets as a function of their relation to the primes reect automatic processes that are, therefore, not subject to conscious control (e.g., Neely, 1977). Given these conditions, the likelihood is very low that the correction derives from any deliberate process. Additionally, the accuracy motivation itself is not a sufcient cause of reverse priming; rather, a sense that accuracy might be threatened must also be present, and this may derive from a chronic unconscious vigilance for bias.2 There is further evidence in the Glaser and Banaji (1999) data that the vigilance necessary to trigger the accuracy-motivated correction is nonconscious. First of all, the pattern (normal priming for mild primes and reverse priming for extreme primes) obtains throughout the procedure, in the earliest, middle, and latest trials of the experiment. Therefore, it does not appear to result from a developing strategy arising from aroused suspicion on the part of subjects. More important, the effect obtained for a remarkably high number of subjects (virtually all) in the earliest experiments (those including racial stimuli) despite the fact that only a handful, during debrieng, guessed that prime and target congruence would affect response time (and no subjects surmised that evaluative congruence mattered). Past research has demonstrated convincingly that evaluation can occur spontaneously, unintentionally, and without awareness (e.g., Bargh et al., 1992, 1996; Fazio et al., 1986; Greenwald et al., 1989, 1996; see Fazio, 2001; Klauer, 1998, for reviews). The reverse priming effects appear to indicate that on some nonconscious level we knowwe are aware, if you willthat we evaluate extraneous, potentially distracting or biasing stimuli, and we will consequently attempt to correct accordingly.

The Prevalence of Reverse Priming

If reverse priming is restricted to the specic conditions of the Glaser and Banaji (1999) research, even with its many procedural variances and differing stimulus sets across experiments, then its generality and, consequently, importance is debatable. However, reverse priming effects reported by others suggest that the phenomenon is not altogether rare and that it is not limited to specic conditions such as pronunciation tasks. Hermans (1996, as described in Banse, 2001) obtained reverse priming results in an automatic evaluation experiment using an evaluative judgmentCompensatory Automaticity 183

task. More recently, Banse (2001) found reverse priming with an evaluation task with subliminal face and name primes, but not when the primes were supraliminal. Although at this stage the discrepancy in Banses ndings with regard to the perceptibility of the primes is inexplicable, the fact that reverse priming occurred with subliminal primes, which subjects could not consciously perceive, makes an even stronger case that the compensatory processes, if that is what they are, transpire outside of conscious awareness or control. Another study may shed light on the issue of underlying mechanisms for reverse priming. Hypothesizing that people with high anxiety may be more likely to elaborate affective stimuli (Mogg & Marden, 1990), which, in turn, would lead to reverse priming among high- but not low-anxiety subjects, Maier, Berner, and Pekrun (2003) adopted the Glaser and Banaji (1999) procedure (as in the later experiments, excluding racial stimuli), and segmented their sample into low-, moderate-, and high-anxiety subjects. Consistent with Glaser and Banajis (1999) ndings, moderate primes yielded no priming effects. However, with extreme primes, subject anxiety moderated the priming effect qualitatively. Low- and moderate-anxiety subjects showed normal priming effects, while high-anxiety subjects showed reverse priming. In addition to providing a replication of reverse priming and offering a moderating variable, this nding could be interpreted as evidence that reverse priming reects a vigilance for biasing information and an accuracy-motivated correction, which may be higher among highly anxious people. Perhaps of greatest relevance to the issue of automatic correction, Wentura (2000) has found that, with subliminal priming and an evaluation task, when the speed of the response is emphasized in the instructions to subjects, normal priming effects are obtained. When accuracy is emphasized, however, reverse priming results. Wentura offers a different explanation than automatic correction. Drawing on Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seifferts (1998) application of selective attention to negative priming,3 Wentura argues that accuracy motivation will lead subjects to try to discriminate between stimuli, thereby leading to slower responding when prime and target are congruent, presumably because discrimination is harder when they are similar. Such an explanation would not likely apply to the Glaser and Banaji (1999) ndings because only prime, and not target, extremity determined reverse priming. If incongruence effects resulted merely from difculty in discriminating between prime and target, and even if one argued that such difculty would occur only when stimuli are clearly valenced (as with extreme words), Wenturas explanation would predict target extremity to play at least as large a role as prime extremity. That Wenturas discrimination explanation probably does not apply to the Glaser and Banaji ndings is not as important as the fact that this explanation, like that of automatic correction, requires unconscious

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vigilance for biasing information, considering that Wenturas primes were presented subliminally. Like Wentura, Glaser (2003) has directly tested the role of accuracy motivation in reverse priming. In an effort to reconcile the ndings of Glaser and Banaji (1999) with those of Bargh et al. (1996) wherein, despite very similar procedures, no reverse priming was evidenced, Glaser (2003) replicated one of the Bargh et al. (1996) experiments, with identical word stimuli and highly similar procedures. Hypothesizing that accuracy motivation was a necessary condition for the corrective processes that yield reverse priming, Glaser (2003) manipulated between subjects the presence of an accuracy-enhancing instruction. Specically, in earlier research in which reverse priming effects were consistently obtained with extreme primes (e.g., Glaser & Banaji, 1999), experiments had included in the instructions to subjects a directive which stated that trials on which they made errors would be repeated later, and indicated explicitly that it was therefore in the subjects interests to respond accurately. Such an instruction could serve to boost the drive to be accurate, lest subjects have to endure a longer procedure. In the more recent experiment (Glaser, 2003), this instruction was given to only one group of subjects, while the others were given no such warning. The results indicate that the instruction was inuential. Specically, those who did not receive the instruction showed a pattern of results more consistent with that of Bargh et al. (1996), with normal priming for extreme primes.4 More important, for the subjects who were given the accuracy-enhancing instructions, no priming effect was obtained with extreme primes. Interestingly, in this instruction condition (with the accuracy imperative), a reliable priming effect was obtained with moderate primes, suggesting that the accuracy instructions were sufcient to bolster attention to the stimuli enough to strengthen priming with even weakly valenced primes, but perhaps also sufcient to instigate some degree of correction with the extreme primes, but not as much as in previous experiments where overcorrection (and hence reverse priming) was evident. The presence of the priming effect with moderate primes in this condition is important in ruling out the possibility that the accuracy instructions simply prevented priming of any sort, a possibility that was nevertheless unlikely given that such instructions have been used in previous experiments (Glaser & Banaji, 1999) that repeatedly obtained both normal and reverse priming with similar procedures. The absence of a reverse priming effect with strong accuracy instructions is not entirely compelling evidence for an accuracy-mediated correction account. However, in the presence of a normal priming effect with moderate primes, the absence of any effect with extreme primes, with which reverse priming effects have been repeatedly obtained in the past, suggests that some degree of reverse priming is occurring when accurate responding is encour-

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aged. Consistent with this, Wentura (2000) entertained the possibility, and we agree, that a null result in an automatic evaluation experiment, might reect a heterogeneous distribution of some subjects showing a congruence effect and some showing an incongruence effect (p. 4). In other words, reverse priming, and the unconscious vigilance for biasing information that gives rise to it, may be relatively common but masked by individual differences within an experiment wherein normal and reverse priming effects may cancel each other out. Similarly, null results in automatic evaluation studies may result from the use of priming stimuli that straddle the evaluative extremity continuum enough to engender competing, and self-canceling, normal and reverse priming responses, as may be the case in Glaser and Banajis (1999) post hoc analyses of the least extreme of their extreme primes, which showed no priming effect at all. This is not to say that all or even most null results in affective priming experiments are confounded by reverse priming; this would be an unfalsiable and reckless assertion. Rather, it simply seems likely that, because until recently reverse priming was undiscovered, it may be more prevalent than one would think. Glaser and Banaji (1999) suggested that, because of the counterintuitive nature of reverse priming effects and the likelihood that they will confound predictions, many such ndings may never have been published and allowed to see the proverbial light of day. In fact, as Glaser and Banaji noted, a quick survey of the published research on nonconscious priming reveals more than a few unexpected, and often unexplained, contrast effects (e.g., Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993; De Houwer, Hendrickx, & Baeyens, 1997; Eimer & Schlaghecken, 1999; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) that may reect unconscious compensatory mechanisms and at least raise the question of the prevalence of such ndings, published or not.

Controlling Automatic Stereotypes

Another literature promises to shed further light on the issue of unconscious correction for unintended thoughts and biases. In recent years, acknowledging that exposure to cultural stereotypes is virtually inevitable (Devine, 1989; but see Lepore & Brown, 1997, 1999), social psychologists have sought to identify conditions under which the automatic activation and application of such stereotypes can be derailed. Although most conceptions of automatic processes hold that they are beyond deliberate control (e.g., Bargh, 1994; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), there have been compelling arguments allowing for some measure of control (e.g., Logan, 1989). With regard to controlling automatic stereotypes, initial ndings indicate that, while stereotype suppression is difcult and perhaps even counterpro-

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ductive (e.g., Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Wheeler, 1996; Wegner, 1994), under some circumstances people appear capable of moderating the effects of automatic stereotype activation (see Monteith, Sherman, & Devine, 1998; and Blair, 2002, for reviews). Research has now documented that people who are highly motivated to control prejudice can dampen the explicit expression of automatically activated biases (e.g., Fazio et al., 1995), perhaps with the subsequent activation of egalitarian replacement thoughts (Monteith, 1993), and this has been demonstrated even when measuring the automatic activation of the stereotypes, as in a semantic priming paradigm (Blair & Banaji, 1996). Similarly, Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, and Russin (2000) have shown that following considerable counterstereotype training, subjects will show less automatic stereotype activation. This concept of competing impulses is also expressed in Wilson, Lindsey, and Schoolers (2000) model of dual attitudes, where the concept of automatic override (p. 106) holds that explicit attitudes may trump implicit ones. However, promising as these stereotype elimination effects are, they require a somewhat deliberate strategy and/or the complete relearning of automatic associations, which cannot be readily equated with unconscious volition and control. The question of whether the automatic activation of stereotypes can be prevented or intercepted due to nonconscious motivations has only recently been addressed. Moskowitz et al. (1999; see also Moskowitz, 2001) demonstrated that people with high egalitarian (e.g., antiprejudice) goals exhibit less automatic activation of stereotypes even though they have the same knowledge of these stereotypes as do those with lower egalitarian motives, who showed greater automatic activation of stereotypes. Having identied an indirect measure of chronic egalitarian goals, Moskowitz et al. (1999) submitted subjects who scored high and low in egalitarianism to a procedure with striking similarities to that employed by Glaser and Banaji (1999) and Glaser (2003); an automatic gender stereotyping test employing a semantic priming paradigm with a 200 ms SOA (the time from onset of the prime to the onset of the target stimulus) and latency to pronounce the target word as the dependent variable. Photographs of men and women were used as primes, while attributes stereotypical of men and women, as well as gender-irrelevant words, were presented as targets. The use of the short SOA as well as the relatively ambiguous pronunciation task served a function similar to that intended by Glaser and Banaji (1999); to ensure that differential response times as a function of prime-target gender stereotype match reected automatic activation of gender stereotypes by the mere perception of the primes, and not an intentional response. Predicting that chronic egalitarian goals would serve to obstruct even the automatic activation of gender stereotypes, Moskowitz et al. (1999) indeed found that subjects who scored high

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on their indirect measure of chronic egalitarianism exhibited no automatic gender stereotyping. Importantly, those who had scored low in chronic egalitarianism did exhibit automatic gender stereotype activation in this experiment. In order to demonstrate more directly that those high in chronic egalitarianism actively, albeit nonconsciously, inhibited the automatic activation of stereotypes, Moskowitz et al. (1999) followed up this experiment with a negative priming experiment wherein participants were presented with two primes simultaneously; one that was supposed to be ignored but that varied in its female stereotype relevance. Target words, which were again to be pronounced, were also either stereotype relevant or not, and they were either the same word as the prime that was to be ignored or not. Moskowitz et al. found again that only those subjects who were low in chronic egalitarianism exhibited automatic stereotype activation. In contrast, those who had scored high in chronic egalitarianism were actually slower to respond to femininestereotypical target words following female distractor primes than following gender-irrelevant primes, indicating that they were effectively inhibiting, or perhaps correcting for, the stereotypical content that might have been activated by these primes. Moskowitz et al. concluded that egalitarians, while sharing knowledge of cultural stereotypes, are able to counteract the automatic activation of those stereotypes without conscious intent. We are very sympathetic to Moskowitz et al.s view, similar to that expressed by Glaser and Banaji (1999), that volition, in the form of vigilance for unintended bias, can occur outside of consciousness: Despite the fact that the English language vernacular equates intent with conscious and effortful forms of pursuing a desired end state, volition can be exerted preconsciously. A passive process like stereotype activation could be controlled by goal pursuit, which could be activated as passively as stereotype activation (Moskowitz et al., 1999, p. 169). Although the Moskowitz et al. ndings make a strong case for unconscious volition and compensation for unwanted thoughts, the reverse priming in automatic evaluation effects (Glaser & Banaji, 1999) add some value to the argument because, in the absence of group-relevant information (e.g., faces, names, stereotypes), motivations to avoid bias are unlikely to originate consciously. In other words, the Moskowitz et al. ndings illustrate compellingly that chronic goals will motivate the suppression of an automatic response, but it is not yet entirely clear that such goals would be activated without the conscious recognition that something about bias was being measured. In fact, Wasel and Gollwitzer (1997) found, using a similar paradigm, that high egalitarians inhibited automatic stereotype activation only when primes were supraliminal (i.e., consciously perceptible), but when primes were presented subliminally, even high egalitarians failed to inhibit automatic stereotyping, suggesting that at least the potential for bias may need to reach conscious188 Basic Mechanisms

ness for inhibition or correction to occur. On the other hand, reverse priming in automatic evaluation with a highly nonreactive pronunciation task, especially in experiments excluding racial stimuli (Glaser & Banaji, 1999, Experiments 46), holds considerably less chance that the correction is related to a consciously activated goal. Furthermore, Banses (2001) nding of reverse priming with subliminal primes indicates that conscious awareness of the potential for bias is not necessary. Finally, the demonstrated moderating role of accuracy instructions (Glaser, 2003; Wentura, 2000) and trait anxiety (Maier et al., 2003) strongly suggest that reverse priming reects a motivated, specically accuracy-motivated, corrective response. Even though in the Glaser and Banaji (1999) studies and for some subjects in Glaser (2003), accuracy is explicitly encouraged in the instructions, such exhortations are likely to only indirectly inuence the nonconscious accuracy motivation that we posit gives rise to reverse priming. Subjects are typically unaware that evaluation is being measured, and consequently any motivation to correct for bias in a judgment that one does not even know is being made, let alone that the potential for bias exists, must itself have nonconscious bases. With reverse priming, therefore, we have a full representation of the evaluative process, including the evaluative response itself, the goal to evaluate accurately, and the corrective measures to ensure accuracy, all operating under the proverbial hoodnonconsciously.

ConclusionEvidence from studies of automatic affect (e.g., Glaser & Banaji, 1999) and cognition (e.g., Moskowitz et al., 1999) suggests that, in addition to the ability to process the meaning of, categorize, and evaluate perceived stimuli automatically, the human mind is capable of maintaining unconscious vigilance over its own automatic processes. This suggests a volitional nature of the unconscious, an idea that to many may seem self-contradictory. In the construct activation literature so central to social cognitive theory and research, the unconscious has been credited with (or blamed for, as the case may be) simplistic, assimilative inuences on judgments, while the compensatory efforts necessary to obtain contrast effects have been ascribed strictly to deliberate, conscious processes (e.g., Wilson & Brekke, 1994). However, when observed in responses that most likely reect automatic processes, contrast effects stemming from correction (e.g., Glaser & Banaji, 1999) indicate that people can unconsciously monitor and correct for bias in judgments, just as they might consciously. That goals can operate at the unconscious level, and subsequently inuence explicit judgments and behaviors, is now well demonstrated (e.g.,Compensatory Automaticity 189

Bargh & Barndollar, 1996; Bargh et al., 2001; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). Evidence that corrective processes can occur even when a person is unaware that she is making a judgment, as in the case of a priming procedure with a nonreactive response task (i.e., the pronunciation task), and especially considering that accuracy motivation moderates such automatic compensatory effects (Glaser, 2003; Wentura, 2000), however, implicates unconscious, metacognitive processing goals. Similarly, demonstrations of the effects of chronic ideological goals (e.g., egalitarianism) on suppressing automatic, and therefore previously presumed uncontrollable, responses (Moskowitz et al., 1999) bolster the thesis of unconscious volition. Building on the trend to allow for a full spectrum of mental life (i.e., affect, cognition, and motivation) in the unconscious (Bargh, 1996, 1997; Kihlstrom, 1987, 1999), we go a step further to suggest that the unconscious is indeed capable of holding such metacognitive processing goals (e.g., accuracy) which it will pursue through self-monitoring, and that it will, under some conditions, compensate for anticipated threats to the attainment of those goals. This thesis, and the ndings supporting it, represents a departure from traditional conceptions of the unconscious as passive and reactive, suggesting an unconscious that is, paradoxically, aware.

Acknowledgments Production of this chapter was supported by a National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health, Grant MH12195 to the rst author and Grant MH35856 to the second author, as well as institutional support from the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. We are grateful to Molly Parker Tapias for incisive comments and Miranda Chiu and Brian Penrod for assistance with the research.

Notes1. The food words were included because of an interest in a possible disgust component of racial bias. 2. This concept of unconscious vigilance should be distinguished from Pratto and Johns (1991) theory of automatic vigilance, which holds that people are chronically vigilant for negative information. 3. Negative priming is an inhibitory effect wherein responses are slower to targets that served as primes in preceding trials (May, Kane, & Hasher, 1995). It is distinct from what we are calling reverse priming, which appears to be a within-trial phenomenon. 4. Inconsistent with Bargh et al. (1996), no priming effect was obtained with moderately valenced primes in the low-accuracy instruction condition, suggesting that attitude strength may under some conditions moderate attitude activation (e.g., Fazio et al., 1986).

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8Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working MemoryRan R. Hassin

A question that is raised by almost every chapter in this book, in one guise or another, concerns the types of processes that can occur nonconsciously versus those that cannot. The evidence, regrettably, is mixed. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the unconscious can carry out some complex computations more efciently than the most powerful computer available to date. For example, it transforms activation patterns on the retina into meaningful pictures of the world, and patterns of sound waves into meaningful sentences. Similarly, the unconscious earns our admiration because it coordinates our physical and mental processes in a seemingly effortless way, thus allowing us, for example, to drive, listen to NPR, bless the driver in the car in front of us, and talk to our mothers-in-law on the cell phone, all at the same time and at least somewhat successfully. On the other hand, other evidence suggests that our admiration might be a little premature, and that there are many straightforward computations that the unconscious cannot carry out. Examples include simple things such as ignoring irrelevant visual information when judging the length of lines (thus creating visual illusions such as the Muller-Lyer), sufciently incorpo rating evidence about the current situation into our explanations of human behavior (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986), and properly using available information in our judgments and decisions (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). The empirical examination of the capacities and capabilities of the cognitive unconscious creates an ongoing debate, partly because each new piece of evidence may carry far-reaching implications for our understanding of consciousness, or, more generally, for our views on what is it like to be human.

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Adding to this discourse, the current chapter tackles the question by empirically and conceptually examining working memory (WM) and controlled processes, whichunlike their longtime companions, the automatic processes are exclusively associated with conscious processing. Automatic cognitive processes are internal automatons that help us navigate a multifaceted and complex environment by slicing it into easily digestible bites. They may be unintentional, nonconscious, ballistic, and effortless, and can thus free our very-limited-capacity consciousness from many burdens. Although traditionally such automatons were thought to have a very limited range, research in the last quarter century indicates that their scope is much wider than we used to think: Not only can people automatically understand language and perceive visual scenes, they can also evaluate objects as good and bad, form impressions of other individuals, and make use of stereotypes and other categorical information while thinking of other people. Controlled processes are usually thought of as the counterpart of automatic processes. They are intentional, conscious, and effortful, and hence allow more comprehensive information processing, one that exploits the richness and exibility of consciousness and thus avoids the pitfalls of the narrow, one-track-minded automatons. Controlled processes in higher cognition are often perceived as the quintessence of human beings, the types of processes that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom: Making a difcult decision, exibly pursuing a goal, willfully inhibiting ones immediate responses, and multitasking are a few examples of higher cognitive processes that are traditionally thought of as controlled. In light of this prevalent view of automaticity and control, it is hardly surprising that the notion of nonconscious controlwhich appears in the title of this chapteris widely held to be an oxymoron.1 On the most immediate level, this widespread belief appears to rest on pure logical groundshow can (controlled) processes be conscious and nonconscious at the same time? But a closer look reveals that the notion of nonconscious controlled processes in higher cognition is disturbing for another deep reason: It suggests that mental processes, which are central to our conception of what it is to be human, occur outside of conscious awareness and have no phenomenology. Worries of this kind have led to a general disregard of the prospects of nonconscious controlled processes. This attitude continues to characterize the elds of cognitive psychology and social cognition despite the fact that research has started to yield evidence for nonconscious cognitive control in the area of automatic evaluation and stereotype use (see, e.g., chapters 7 and 17, this volume; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999). The main purpose of this chapter is to advance the argument for nonconscious control and nonconscious controlled processes, and it does so in three

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ways: First, it presents systematic data which show that WMthe mental mechanism that is perhaps most associated with controlled, conscious processingcan operate outside of conscious awareness. Second, it reviews recent ndings in social cognition and shows how they suggest that motivational aspects of WM can exibly control behavior outside of conscious awareness. Last, it presents a conceptual analysis that starts by pointing out that the notion of control is used in more than one sense. Importantly, once the meanings of control are un-confounded, the relations of conscious awareness and cognitive control become a matter of empirical inquiry. Hence, I argue, the notion of nonconscious control is not an oxymoron and, indeed, it cannot be oneby denition.

OverviewDue to the intimate relationships between WM and controlled processes, the arguments and evidence for implicit WM and nonconscious control are inherently interwovena fact that is reected in the different sections of this chapter. The rst two sections are devoted to WM. In the rst, WM is succinctly described from three different perspectives: the functions that it serves, tasks that examine it, and models that describe it. A discussion of the relations of WM and conscious awareness closes the section. Next, a novel paradigm is described, and based on the conclusions of the rst section it is argued that this paradigm examines cognitive components of WM. Four experiments that provide direct evidence for implicit WMand hence nonconscious control are subsequently discussed. The argument for nonconscious control and implicit WM is bolstered in the third section, where it is argued that nonconscious goal pursuit (e.g., Aarts, Gollwitzer, & Hassin, in press; Bargh, 1990; Bargh, Gollwitzer, LeeChai, Barndollar, & Trotschel, 2001; Kruglanski et al., 2002; Shah, 2003) provides evidence for the nonconscious operation of motivational aspects of working memory. Evidence for exible nonconscious control, via nonconscious goals, seals this section. The arguments and data are summarized in the fourth section. Closing a circle, the epilogue reconsiders the concept of control. It is argued that control is used (by social and higher level cognitive psychologists alike) in two different senses, and that this confusion leads us to conceive of nonconscious control as an oxymoron. Once these two meanings are disentangled, the intimate relationships between cognitive control and conscious awareness dissolve. The notion of nonconscious control, which appears to be an oxymoron, thus turns out to be logically possible.

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Working Memory A Brief Overview

The notion of WM grew out of the literature on short-term memory (STM) in the mid-1970s (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), and has since grown to become a major eld of research in cognitive psychology and in the more recent area of cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Smith & Jonides, 1995). Working memory, like STM, is an online mechanism that retains items in memory for short periods of time. Unlike STM, however, WM comprises multiple components, and it does more than retain information: Using its executive functions, it selectively attends to the environment (whether internal or external; see Garavan, 1998). Moreover, WM can manipulate the items retained in memory, and it can coordinate the use of these representations in complex cognitive processes. These characteristics make WM a perfect candidate for a bridge, or gateway, between relatively simple cognitive processes (such as memorizing) and relatively complex ones (such as comprehension processes; see, e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993; Logie & Gilhooly, 1998). Findings that support this contention relate WM to problem solving and analogies (Carpenter, Just, & Shell, 1990), language comprehension (Just & Carpenter, 1992), reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), reasoning (Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), general uid intelligence (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), and even extraversion and person perception (Lieberman & Rosenthal, 2001; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Schloerscheidt, & Milne, 1999). Partly in light of ndings of this sort, Baddeley and Logie (1999) argue that working memory . . . allow[s] . . . humans to comprehend and mentally represent their immediate environment, to retain information about their immediate past experience, to support the acquisition of new knowledge, to solve problems, and to formulate, relate and act on current goals (p. 28). This view of WM seems to represent the consensus among WM researchers: After reviewing major theories and ndings in the WM literature, Miyake and Shah (1999) conclude that working memory is not for memorizing per se but, rather, it is in the service of complex cognitive activities such as language processing, visuospatial thinking, reasoning and problem solving, and decision making (p. 445). To use a simple, blatantly wrong, yet illuminating metaphor, working memory seems to be the controller of controlled processes (see chapter 1). Despite the widespread interest in WM, however, and in spite of the apparent consensus regarding its functional characterization, it is not easy to gure out what working memory really is (Miyake & Shah, 1999, p. 1). Since

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a comprehensive review of the models and tasks of working memory is beyond the scope of this chapter, I choose to describe two of the prominent models, hoping to present a relatively clear picture of working memory while emphasizing functional similarities over architectural differences (for a comprehensive review, the reader is referred to Miyake and Shahs excellent 1999 book on the subject).

Two Models of Working Memory

The following paragraphs succinctly describe two models of WM. That of Baddeley, Hitch, and their colleagues is probably most often identied as the starting point of the modern examination of WM (e.g., Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). The second model, that of Cohen and his colleagues, is probably the most biologically implemented model of WM (Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990; OReilly, Braver, & Cohen, 1999). Baddeleys classic model of WM is composed of an executive component and two slave systems (but see Baddeley, 2002, for the most recent advancement of the model). The two slave systems are the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpadtwo specialized, temporary memory systems that actively maintain information via rehearsal. The phonological loop maintains verbally coded information, and the visuospatial sketchpad maintains visual and/or spatial information. The central executive is involved in the control and regulation of WM and WM-related tasks, and performs such tasks as coordinating the two slave systems and activating relevant representations within long-term memory. Despite its central role in WM, the central executive remains the least specied component of WM (Baddeley, 1996, p. 5). In the model of Cohen and his colleagues (e.g., Cohen et al., 1990; OReilly et al., 1999), WM is dened as controlled processing involving active maintenance and/or rapid learning. The features of the model include a prefrontal cortex specialized for active maintenance of information that is dynamically updated, allowing it to bias ongoing processing; a hippocampus specialized for rapid learning of arbitrary information (that can serve, too, in the service of controlled processing), and a posterior perceptual and motor cortex that exhibits slow, long-term learning. According to this model, controldened as biasing of relevant cognitive processesresults from the interaction of the different subsystems of WM. Note that despite the differences in cognitive architecture, the two models are quite similar functionally: WM involves active maintenance and (rapid) learning of material, in the service of cognitive control and relatively complex cognitive processes. This view is shared by most, if not all, models of WM (see Miyake & Shah, 1999), a consensus that is also reected in the various tasks that are used to examine WM capacities.200 Basic Mechanisms

Measuring Working Memory

In this section, three frequently used WM tasks are described, and their similarities are outlined. Specically, the current presentation focuses on certain mental functions and operations that are necessary for completing these tasks successfully, in the assumption that these operations reect researchers beliefs regarding the characteristics of WM (this list is far from being comprehensive and is meant to be illustrative; for description of more WM tasks see, e.g., Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999).2 First, consider the reading span, a task developed to assess individual differences in the capacity of WM (e.g., Daneman & Carpenter, 1980, 1983). Participants engaged in this task are given increasingly long sets of sentences to read aloud. At the end of each set, they are asked to try to recall the nal word of each sentence in the set. The span is dened as the maximum number of sentences the subject could read aloud while maintaining perfect recall. What does it take to be good at this task? First, one has to be able to retain instructions in an active memory. Second, one has to be able to maintain a list of the encountered last words in memory, and to update it with each sentence one reads. Third, this retaining and updating should be somewhat resistant to interference from the words that appear in the sentences. Fourth, the information should be available to concurrent cognitive processes (that allow, e.g., verbalization of the list). As a second example, consider the continuous performance task (CPT), which involves searching for a target stimulus in a continuous stream of stimuli (e.g., OReilly et al., 1999). The search in a CPT is conditional: Participants are instructed to regard a designated stimulus (e.g., H) as a target if and only if it follows another, specic, stimulus (e.g., Y). Participants are further asked to perform a certain behavior (e.g., to press a key) whenever they encounter a target. To perform well in this task, as in the reading span, one needs to successfully maintain the instructions in an active memory system. Moreover, in order to identify a target and to launch the target-related behavior, one needs to maintainand monitora list of the presented letters. Last, the whole process should be somewhat resistant to interference from other letters that appear in the list. Consider, as a last example, the N-back task, in which participants are exposed to a stream of stimuli (e.g., letters) and are asked to judge whether the stimulus that they currently see is identical (or not) to the one that they saw N trials ago (e.g., Smith & Jonides, 1999). Again, to succeed at this task, participants must be able to perform several cognitive operations successfully. First, they must keep the instructions in an active memory system. Second, they must maintain an activeand correctly orderedlist of the N last letters. Third, they must continuously compare the current letter with the one pre-

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sented N trials ago, and if a match is noted they must successfully launch the target-related behavior. Last, the maintained list should be somewhat immune to interference from the letters in the list. The above analysis, then, suggests that there is a considerable consensus regarding the characteristics examined by WM tasks like the ones discussed herein. This consensus, in turn, points to a substantial agreement regarding the functions of working memory:1. Active maintenance of ordered information for relatively short periods of time 2. Context-relevant updating of information and goal-relevant computations involving active representations 3. Rapid biasing of (task relevant) cognitions and behaviors in the service of currently held goals 4. Some sort of resistance to interference

Conscious Awareness and Working Memory

Now that an illustrative sample of models and paradigms of WM has been presented, highlighting the intimate relationships between WM and control processes, it is time to turn to another major concern: the nature of the relations of WM and conscious awareness. The consensus among WM and consciousness researchers seems to be that the psychological processes underlying WM, attention, and awareness are strongly related (Baars, 1997a; Kintsch, Healy, Hegarety, Pennington, & Salthouse, 1999). The nature of these relations, however, is less clear. Kintsch and colleagues (1999, p. 431) propose what might be called the subset hypothesis, according to which a subset of the information that is actively maintained [in working memory] is also that which one is aware or conscious of.). Baars (1997b) seems to go one step further by suggesting that consciousness is evidently involved in all WM input, output, and voluntary operations, as in explicit problem solving (p. 369). An even stronger view of the relations is proposed by Baddeley (e.g., 1993): conscious awareness [is] one of the functions of the central executive component of working memory (p. 26). These hypotheses are supported by several lines of research that relate different conscious experiences to WM processes and components. Thus, for example, Baddeley and Andrade (2000) showed that phenomenological experiences of vividness are affected by load: When WM is put under load, objects of imagery seem less vivid than when WM is not under load. Similarly, Teasdale, Dritschel, Taylor, and Proctor (1995) linked conscious-mind wandering to the central executive, by showing that stimulus-independent thoughts occurred less frequently when the central executive was put under load. In another demonstration of the causal relations obtaining between working202 Basic Mechanisms

memory and conscious awareness, a visuospatial secondary task has been shown to affect emotional experiences (e.g., Andrade, 2001; Andrade, Kavanagh, & Baddeley, 1997). Note that the views portrayed above weave conscious awareness and components of WM closely together (cf. Kihlstrom, 1997). Some even suggest a unidirectional causal arrow, leading from WM to conscious awareness. Consequently, the main empirical inquiries into the nature of the relations between WM and conscious awareness examine the role of the former in determining the contents and qualities of conscious experience. The complementary inquiry, one that attempts to understand the role of consciousness in the functions of WM, did not receive much experimental or theoretical attention (but see Baars, 1997b). One basic form of this question concerns us here: Is conscious awareness necessary for (certain operations of) WM, or can WM operate outside of conscious awareness? The views sketched above imply, some even explicitly, that WM cannot operate entirely outside of conscious awareness. This stance is reected unequivocally in the nature of WM tasks: In all of the tasks presented above, and in all that we know of, participants are explicitly presented with materials that they are explicitly asked to manipulate (memorize, rehearse, add, subtract, and so on). By their very nature, then, existing WM tasks cannot systematically address questions regarding the roles of conscious awareness in WM. This is a clear indication that the eld assumeseven if sometimes implicitlythat, in essence, WM is conscious. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary comes from a neuroimaging study conducted by Jonides, Smith, Marshuetz, Koeppe, and Reuter-Lorenz (1998). In this study, four target letters were presented for storage followed, 3 seconds later, by a probe letter that either matched a target letter or did not. On some trials, when the probe did not match a target letter and therefore required a no response, the probe did match a target letter of the previous trial. On these trials, a yes response was prepotent and had to be inhibited. As hypothesized, these trials yielded brain activation in areas that are traditionally viewed as related to WM (i.e., Brodmanns area 45). Surprisingly, however, participants did not consciously remember that the targets had appeared on a previous trial, nor did they have a phenomenological experience of inhibition (Smith, personal communication, 2001).

Implicit Working Memory: The Lesson From Implicit Insights

This section presents evidence for an implicit mode of the cognitive components of WM. For the sake of brevity, I call this mode implicit working memory (note that by using this term, I do not suggest that there are two WMs;Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 203

it is simply a shorthand). The evidence was gathered in a novel WM paradigm that requires perceptual judgments and hence, unlike the paradigms described above, does not explicitly activate WM processes. This paradigm allows us to examine whether WM is necessarily conscious, or whether it may, under some circumstances, operate outside of conscious awareness. This new paradigm was developed to examine one of the products of WMinsights (see Hassin & Bargh, 2004). As a cursory background, then, the rst part of this section discusses the role of conscious awareness in insights and denes what implicit insights are. Then the paradigm is described, and its characteristics are compared with those of established WM paradigms. The upshot of this comparison is that this new paradigm is a WM paradigm. The results of four experiments that demonstrate implicit insights, and hence implicit WM, are presented in the last part of this section.

On Conscious Awareness and Insights

In successfully solving insight problems, one suddenly realizes that one has developed a better grasp of the underlying structure of a problem, or an improved understanding of the rules that govern a phenomenon of interest. Insights are usually conceived of as being conscious, and the associated aha experience is sometimes even included in the denition of insight (for various approaches to insights, see Sternberg & Davidson, 1995). Unlike the insights themselves, however, it seems that the processes that yield insights do not require conscious awareness. So, for example, Metcalfe and colleagues (Metcalfe, 1986a; Metcalfe & Wiebe, 1987) have shown that when people try to solve insight problems, they do not have an accurate feeling of how far they are from nding a solution (as indicated by a feeling thermometer). These ndings suggest that insights tend to pop up in awareness without prior conscious evidence for their formation. In a series of studies, we (Hassin et al., 2004) further examined the role of conscious awareness in insights. More specically, we examined whether insights can occur not only in the absence of conscious awareness of the processes that lead to them, but also in the absence of conscious awareness of the insights themselves.3 Importantly, the insights we were interested in were those that relied on working memory processes. Thus, if implicit insights of this kind occur, they provide evidence for implicit WM. Dening Implicit Insights In implicit insights, as in explicit ones, the mind extracts patterns, rules, or higher order invariants that relate two or more objects or events in a stimulus space. This extraction can occur even in the absence of apparent conditional probabilities between the objects/events. In other words, the processes that lead to implicit insightslike those that lead204 Basic Mechanisms

to explicit onesdo not necessarily depend on gathering specic relational facts. Implicit insights are unconscious in that (a) they can occur without awareness of the learned rules and (b) they can be manifested in behavior without awareness. In addition, implicit insights are unintentional in that they can occur when people do not intend for them to happen, and in that they can affect behavior without a corresponding intention. Implicit Insights and Implicit Learning Implicit insight formation is similar to implicit learning in that both processes consist of extractions of rules (or patterns) in the absence of intention and awareness (cf. Lewicki, Hill, & Bizot, 1988; Nissen & Bullemer, 1987; Reber, 1993; Stadler & Frensch, 1998). There are two major differences between these processes, though. First, implicit learning occurs only when statistical information is available, that is, when the to-be-learned patterns are abundantly repeated, thus allowing for extractions of conditioned probabilities (e.g., stimulus H follows Y on 75% of the trials, whereas K follows Y on 25%). Implicit insights, on the other hand, do not necessitate statistical information of this kind. Indeed, such information is often irrelevant. Finding a solution to insight problems depends on mechanisms that allow us to see underlying structures, patterns, and rules even in the absence of statistical information. The second major difference between implicit insights and implicit learning is that the latter develops gradually over time (with the repeated presentation of the materials), whereas the formerlike explicit insightsmay occur very abruptly.

Implicit Insights and Working Memory

A paradigm for examining one kind of implicit insights is described below. What is crucial for the current purposes is that this paradigm examines implicit insights that occur in WM. The general characteristics of this paradigm are the following: A computer screen is divided into a matrix of 24 (columns) by 18 (lines). Small round disks that are either empty (i.e., bagel-like) or full appear in the different intersections of the matrix. The participants task is perceptual: They are asked to indicate whether the disk is full or empty. After each response, the disk disappears and the next stimulus appears. The stimuli appear in sets of ve, which are separated from each other by a xation point. There are three different kinds of sets, which dene three conditions: rule sets (the locations of all the disks in a set follow a rule), yoked broken rule sets (the locations of the rst four disks in a set follow a rule, but the location of the fth disk does not), and yoked control sets (see an illustration in gure 8.1; examples for rules in table 8.1).4 Importantly, in all of the experiments described below, the proportion of rule sets never exceeds 12.5%.Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 205

Figure 8.1 An illustration of a rule set (a) and its yoked broken rule set (b), control set (c), and scrambled set (d; adapted from Hassin et al., 2004). The numbers appearing below the locations indicate order of appearance, and did not appear in the actual experiment. The disks in the actual experiment appeared sequentially, such that subjects saw only one at a time.

206

Figure 8.1

Continued.

207

Table 8.1 A Few Examples of Rules Used in These Experiments x Axis Rule #1 2 3 4 5

Note: Numbers represent matrix units (i.e., 1 equals one cell). The + sign represents a rightward movement on the x axis and an upward movement on the y axis. There are three movements in each set before implicit insights are examined, and they are given in order from left to right. Source: Hassin et al. (2004).

Whether the disks are full or empty is always randomly determined. Thus, the dimensions of disk type (whether they are full or empty) and disk location are orthogonal. Learning the rules that determine locations, then, cannot help participants predict the correct answers. However, if participants extract a rule during a rule set, they can correctly anticipate the location of the last disk in that particular set. This allows them to shift their eyes or attention to the right location, thus speeding up the process of identifying the disk. If they extract a rule during broken rule sets, however, their anticipations will err systematically and they will move their eyes or attention to incorrect locations, thus slowing down their responses. Note that participants explicit task is to judge whether the disks are empty or full. This is the only task that they are told about andto presage later ndingsthe only task that they are aware of. Hence, extraction of the rules that govern the disks locations is incidental in this paradigm. Yet it is success in this second, implicit task that may yield evidence for implicit insights. The dependent measure of interest is the reaction time (RT) to the last disk in each rule, broken rule, and control set (this is a very easy task, and errors are minimal). Because of the hypothesized rule-driven anticipations of the disks locations, we expected that RTs to last disks in rule sets (where rulebased anticipations are veridical) would be faster than RTs to the last disks in broken rule sets (where rule-based anticipations are systematically misleading). Importantly, by presenting each rule set and its associated broken rule set an equal number of times, we kept the conditional probabilities equal. Consequently, given four disks that follow a rule, the likelihood of a rulefollowing disk is identical to the likelihood of a rule-breaking disk. This measure prevents the possibility of more gradual, statistical learning in the course of the experiment. Is this a WM paradigm? To examine the similarity between the current paradigm and the WM paradigms described previously, consider the mental208 Basic Mechanisms

operations that need to take place in order for implicit insights to occur. First, the goals of being fast and accurate need to be in place. Second, one must actively maintain and update a list of the locations of disks within each given set. Third, the locations of the disks must be maintained in order of their appearance. Fourth, mental computations that involve representations of the locations of the disks must allow for rule (or pattern) extraction. Fifth, the extracted rules must lead to anticipations regarding the locations of the last disks, such that when these anticipations are met, participants become faster than when they are not. In other words, the extracted rules bias other concurrent cognitive processes and thus control behavior. A comparison of the above list with the list of features shared by WM tasks (in the section Measuring Working Memory) reveals that the current paradigm is, indeed, a WM paradigm: It requires active maintenance of ordered information for relatively short periods of time; in addition, it requires updating of information (with incoming disks) and integration (rule extraction). Last, the information is processed in the service of current goals and is readily available to control behavior (i.e., responses).

Examining Implicit Working Memory

In the rst experiment examining implicit WM, participants (20 New York University undergraduates) were exposed to 140 sets, 10% of which were rule, broken rule, and control sets, and 70% of which were random sets. Awareness was assessed at the debrieng: Participants were thoroughly debriefed, and the few who indicated either intention to predict locations, or any awareness of the rules, were excluded from the analysis.5 Participants mean RTs for rule, broken rule, and control sets were subjected to repeated measures analysis of variance, which revealed that participants were signicantly faster in responding to rule sets than to broken rule sets, with responses to control sets falling in between the two. This result indicates that participants did indeed extract the rules and developed congruent expectations. When these expectations were met, participants were faster to react to the last disk than when these expectations were violated. Examining conscious awareness at debrieng is not considered a highly sensitive measure of online awareness (e.g., Merikle & Reingold, 1992). Thus, the second experiment was designed such that the last set presented to participants was always a (randomly chosen) rule set. Immediately after the presentation of this set, participants were given a matrix and were asked to reconstruct it.6 Only one participant successfully reconstructed the last set, thus indicating awareness, and her data were excluded from the analysis. The results of the remaining participants replicated the earlier ndings: RTs for rule sets were signicantly shorter than those for broken rule sets.Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 209

In another attempt to examine participants awareness and intentions, we directly manipulated these factors. Thus, in the third experiment, half of the participants were told in advance that some of the sets would follow rules, and they were encouraged to nd them (instructed condition). The other half were given the same instructions as in Experiments 1 and 2. If participants in the rst two experiments were indeed consciously looking for rules and nding them, but were nonetheless unable to report their intentions or awareness, then there should be no differences between the instructed condition and the noninstructed condition. Previous ndings in the implicit learning literature, however, suggest that under certain circumstances awareness and intention interfere with rule extraction (see e.g., Reber, 1976; Berry & Broadbent, 1988). Based on these ndings, we hypothesized that participants in the instructed condition would not form implicit insights, whereas participants in the noninstructed group would. Indeed, participants in the instructed condition showed no evidence for implicit insights, whereas participants in the noninstructed condition formed implicit insights. An analysis of variance corroborated: The interaction between the instruction factor and the rule factor was signicant. In the last experiment in this series, we examined whether implicit insights show one more characteristic of working memorywhether items are kept in an ordered list. To examine this question, a new condition was introduced: the scrambled sets condition. Each scrambled set was yoked to a rule set and was created by switching the locations of the third and fourth disks (see gure 8.1). If order of presentation and memorization is not important for the formation of implicit insights, then RTs to rule sets should be identical to RTs to scrambled rule sets. However, we hypothesized that the locations are kept in an ordered list and that the order is crucial for the formation of implicit insights. No participant indicated awareness of the rules and their effects. Participants mean RTs revealed that, as hypothesized, mean RTs to rule sets were shorter than mean RTs to scrambled rule sets. The difference between mean RTs to control and scrambled sets was not signicant, however.

Summary and Conclusions

Four experiments provide evidence for implicit insights, and hence for implicit WM. That the implicit insights formed in this paradigm are nonconscious is shown both by evidence from postexperimental probing at debriengs (Experiments 1 and 3), and by evidence from immediate probing and reconstruction (Experiments 2 and 4). In addition, Experiment 3 demonstrated the implicitness of implicit insights through a direct manipulation of intent and awareness: Unlike participants who report neither intention to extract rules nor210 Basic Mechanisms

awareness of them, those who were made aware of the rules, and who were asked to look for them, did not show evidence for implicit insights. To recap, then: Participants were certainly aware of the disks and their features, but they were not aware of the fact that they kept in active memory the ordered locations of these disks. Moreover, participants were not aware of the fact that they were using the locations to extract rules that underlie the disks locations, and they were not aware of the fact that these extracted rules led to congruent anticipations. Last, participants were not aware of the fact that these anticipations affected their behavior and were manifested in it. The mental operations needed for successfully forming the kind of implicit insights examined here are strikingly similar to the functions of WM and the operations examined by other WM tasks (see Working Memory). The current results suggest, then, that the cognitive components of WM can, at least under some circumstances, operate outside of conscious awareness. One metatheoretical issue that is crucial for my claim has to do with the conditions that allow identication of two (or more) tasks in terms of the underlying structures that they examine. At its core, it is a question of justication; in the present case, the claim that needs to be justied is that the current paradigm examines WM. To briey summarize the argument developed in the last two sections, I believe that there are two convincing reasons to accept this claim. First, based on a functional analysis of WM and on an analysis of tasks used to examine WM, criteria for WM tasks have been identied. The paradigm introduced here meets these criteria. Second, the claim that the implicit insight paradigm examines WM is parsimonious: If one does not accept it, then one has to postulate a cognitive mechanism that essentially does exactly what WM does, but nonconsciously. The upshot of the research described in this section is that WM, the mental organ whose essence is cognitive control, can operate completely outside of conscious awareness. The next section examines the motivational aspects of WM in their relation to conscious awareness.

Motivational Control in Implicit Working Memory

In a series of publications, social psychologists have shown that goals can be activated and pursued without conscious awareness (Aarts et al., in press; Bargh et al., 2001; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996; Hassin & Bargh, 2004; Kruglanski et al., 2002; Moskowitz et al., 1999; chapter 2, this volume). Consider, for example, the participants in Aarts et al. (in press; see also Aarts & Hassin, in press), who took part in what allegedly was a series of short experiments. The rst short experiment was bogus. The second was in actuality a priming task: Some participants read a short scenario in which an actors behaviorsNonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 211

implied that he was seeking a casual intimate relationship with a woman he had met earlier (casual intimacy condition), while others read a similar scenario that did not imply this goal. After the completion of this task, participantsall maleswere asked to help either a female or a male experimenter by giving feedback on the rst short experiment (they did not see or meet that person). Participants wooing efforts were assessed through the amount of help they offered. As hypothesized, goals were automatically contagious: Primed participants helped the female experimenter more than nonprimed participants did, whereas help offered to the male experimenter was not affected by priming. This goal contagion effect is nonconscious in that participants were not aware of the nature of the priming episode and of their adoption of the goal. The potential importance of goals to the issue of nonconscious control was rst raised by Moskowitz and colleagues (1999). In a series of clever experiments, they looked at the differences between two populationsthose who have chronic egalitarian goals and those who do not. Their ndings suggest that the former population can refrain from using stereotypes at time intervals that do not allow for conscious control, a nding that they attribute to preconscious control. Due to the inherent limitations of studies that rely on individual differences, however, these results, while highly suggestive, are not yet conclusive in regard to nonconscious control of stereotypes. Note, though, that Moskowitz et al. (1999) share the basic intuition that in the aspects important for the current discussion, nonconscious goal pursuit goes far beyond mere priming of behaviors (cf. Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; chapter 13, this volume). Whereas behavior priming may be considered as a case of mimicry, primed goals nonconsciously guide behavior in an attempt to reach a certain end state. So, for example, the results of the goal contagion study described above cannot be described as a case of behavior mimicry, because participants came up with means of wooing that were not mentioned in the priming stage. Thus, in nonconscious goal pursuit, the means that serve to reach a desired end state may be chosen nonconsciously, suggesting nonconscious control.

Implicit Working Memory and Flexible Goal Pursuit

In order to see how nonconscious goal pursuit implicates not only nonconscious control but also implicit WM, consider an example taken from one of the earliest studies examining nonconscious goal pursuit (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996, Experiment 1). In the rst phase of this study, participants were primed with an information-processing or memorization goal. Priming was achieved through the scrambled sentence test, in which participants were asked to form grammatically correct four-word sentences from items containing ve212 Basic Mechanisms

words presented in a scrambled order. In the impression goal condition, words related to forming an impression were embedded in some of the items, whereas in the memory condition, words related to memorizing information were embedded. Then, in an unrelated experiment, participants were presented with behaviors of a target actor that they were later asked to recall. The results replicated those of a classic study, in which participants were explicitly instructed to either memorize behaviors of a target person or to form an impression of him: Impression formation yields more structured, better remembered mental representations (Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980). Recall that according to the characterization presented in the previous sections, WM has a motivational aspectit holds current goals active and biases concurrent cognitive processes in attempt to maximize goal attainment. If participants who were primed with an impression formation goal held it active in WM, this active goal might have biased the intake and integration of information in a way that is consistent with the conscious activation of this goal. The involvement of WM in nonconscious goal pursuit was more directly examined by Hassin and Bargh (2004), who studied the effects of nonconscious goal priming on one of the most frequently used tests of WMthe Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). In a typical WCST session, participants are presented with cards that have three dimensionscolor, number, and shape (e.g., one card might contain four red squares, another might contain one yellow triangle, and a third might contain three green circles). Participants are presented with one such card at a time, and their task is to sort them into piles according to one of the dimensions (e.g., shape). Participants are not told what the sorting rule is, but they are given feedback after each sorting. After 10 consecutive cards are successfully sorted, the experimenter changes the sorting rule without a warning. The participant, confronted with sudden negative feedback, has to realize that the rule has been changed, to learn a new rule (e.g., the cards are now grouped by numbers), and to sort according to it. This rule learning followed by rule change continues until all cards are sorted. Before taking the WCST, participants in Hassin and Barghs (2004, Experiments 1 and 2) study were either primed, or not, with an achievement goal. This was done through an unrelated word-search task, in which primed participants were exposed to a small number of achievement-related words (such as win and achieve), whereas the word search of the control group did not contain any achievement-related words (cf. Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). Recall that according to the received view, WM cannot be involved in nonconscious goal pursuit simply because the former is conscious while the latter is not. Our view, however, was opposite: We thought that WM is involved in nonconscious pursuit of goals. Hence, we hypothesized that primed participants should fare better on the WCST than the control group.Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 213

A thorough debrieng revealed that subjects were aware of neither the relations between the tasks nor any inuence of the priming episode on their WCST performance. Moreover, there were no signicant differences between the groups in terms of goal commitment. Yet participants who were primed with an achievement goal made signicantly fewer mistakes than participants in the control group. These ndings suggest, then, that WM may sometimes be involved in nonconscious goal pursuit, thus supporting the contention that the motivational components of WM take part in nonconsciously guiding behavior. The WCST experiments allow us to draw another major parallel between conscious and nonconscious controlled processes. WCST measures one aspect of exibility, namely, the ability to shift between mental sets (or tasks), an ability that allows for adaptation to sudden changes in the rules that govern the environment (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000). Flexible adaptiveness is manifested in not committing perseverative errors sortings that are guided by old rules that should no longer guide behavior. Flexibility has traditionally been exclusively ascribed to controlled processes and is perceived as one of the advantages of conscious processes over nonconscious processes (e.g., Nozick, 2001; Schneider, Dumais, & Shiffrin, 1984). Our ndings show, however, that primed participants in the WCST experiment not only committed fewer errors overall, they committed signicantly fewer perseverative errors. In other words, participants who nonconsciously pursued an achievement goal were better at adaptingand thus more exiblethan participants in the control group. This nding was replicated in a third experiment, in which participants were primed with the goal of being exible. Like consciously controlled processes, then, nonconsciously controlled processes may be exible.

ConclusionThe main argument advanced in this chapter is that controlled processes in general, and WM in particular, can operate outside of conscious awareness. These two arguments are inherently interwoven, but for the sake of clarity I have tried to disentangle them. The case for implicit WM is supported by the results of four experiments that use a novel WM paradigm and provide consistent evidence for implicit insights. In addition, recent evidence from nonconscious goal pursuit research, reviewed in the third section, strongly supports the contention that motivational aspects of WM can operate nonconsciously too. That WM can extract rules and patterns and use them to nonconsciously guide behavior is in itself evidence for nonconscious control. The research on goal pursuit complements these ndings by suggesting that WM is involved214 Basic Mechanisms

in nonconscious motivational control of behavior. Evidence from goal priming and WCST seals the argument: Nonconscious control, like its conscious counterpart, allows us to exibly adapt our behaviors and cognitions to our environment, in the service of our goals.

Epilogue: Why Nonconscious Control Is Not an Oxymoron

At the outset of this chapter the prevalent view of automaticity and control was outlined: Automatic processes may be unintentional, nonconscious, ballistic, and effortless; controlled processes are intentional, conscious, stoppable, and effortful. This view entails that nonconscious control is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a (psycho)logical impossibility. Later sections provided contradicting evidence: The ndings reviewed in them suggest that nonconscious control is not only logically possible, it is a psychological reality. The question that inevitably rises, then, is how can these two opposing conceptions be reconciled? A close examination of how social psychologists and higher level cognitive psychologists use the notion of control and controlled processes holds the key to solving this apparent contradiction. The rst thing that such an examination reveals is that we use these notions in more than one sense. On the one hand, we use control to denote cognitive processes with a certain kind of function (e.g., planning, switching, or inhibition of dominant responses). On the other hand, we use control relationally (as in controlled processes) to describe processes that are not automatic, that is, processes that are characterized as conscious, effortful, stoppable, and intentional. To further develop the argument, consider the following working denition of control as consisting of nonperceptual manipulation of attention or information that allows the organism to overcome the habitual and to go beyond the immediately available. This is a functional denitionit anchors the meaning of control in a specic family of functions that capture many prevalent uses of the term. So, for example, in the Stroop literature, control is often conceived of as inhibiting or ignoring the response offered by the meaning of the word (e.g., MacDonald, Cohen, Stenger, & Carter, 2000). In the stereotype literature, control is understood to consist of refraining from succumbing to the behavioral tendencies incorporated into stereotypes (e.g., Devine & Monteith, 1999; Moskowitz et al., 1999)7; and the self-regulation literature assumes that control is achieved when one successfully avoids yielding to immediate temptations (e.g., Trope & Fisbach, 2000). Note that if one adopts this functional denition of control (in actuality, any functional denition will do; cf. chapter 15) then there is no a priori reason to expect that controlled processes would be exclusively conscious (cf.Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 215

Kihlstrom, 1990). This is not the case with the second, relational denition of control (i.e., processes that stand in stark contradiction to automatic processes in terms of their characteristics). According to the latter, controlled processes are conscious by denition, and hence nonconscious control is a contradiction in terms. The multiple meanings of control would not have created a problem had they had the exact same extensions in the world. Alas, this is not the case. The extensions of these two notions of control do not fully overlap, thus creating a loophole through which the appearance of contradiction may creep in: Some processes have functions that fall under functional denitions of control, but characteristics that do not fall under the second, relational denition (and vice versa). Goal pursuit, discussed in the third section, is a process of this kind: On the one hand, functional denitions of control lead us to view goal adoption and pursuit as controlled processes. On the other hand, results from the last decade show that these processes can occur nonconsciously. The upshot of the above discussion is that the received view, according to which controlled processes are exclusively conscious, is so strongly entrenched partly due to a confusion between the two meanings of control. So what should we do now? For those of us who are interested in the mental processes that help us control our behavior, a functional denition seems to be the one we should stick with. The decision to stick with this type of denition carries far-reaching implications, though: Once we give up the relational denition, then all of the combinations of control and conscious awareness become logically possible and hence suitable candidates for empirical inquiry. Bargh (1989, 1994) has convincingly argued that automatic processes (especially in the relatively complex areas studied by social cognition) need not possess all of the qualities traditionally ascribed to them (cf. Cohen et al., 1990; Kahneman & Triesman, 1984; Schneider et al., 1984). Similarly, the view developed here suggests that controlled processes need not possess all the qualities that were historically attributed to them. Controlled processes, to be sure, may be intentional and/or conscious, and/or stoppable, and/or effortful, but they do not have to be. Once we accept this, we open the way for a thorough empirical examination of the characteristics of the different psychological processes we categorize as controlled processes. Specically, this realization calls for an experimental examination of the relations of controlled processes and conscious awareness. Kahneman and Triesman (1984) distinguished among three levels of automaticity in perception, ranging from strong automaticity (where perceptual processing is neither facilitated by focusing attention nor impaired by diverting attention) to occasional automaticity (where perceptual processes require attention but can sometimes be completed without it). It might well be the case that the empirical examination of controlled processes in their relation

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to conscious awareness will reveal a similar trichotomy: (1) controlled processes that can occur both consciously and nonconsciously; (2) controlled processes that can be completed outside of conscious awareness but may be speeded, facilitated, or otherwise affected by conscious awareness; and (3) controlled processes that cannot occur nonconsciously. In terms of this trichotomy, this chapter may be thought of as an existence proof for the rst category. Still, the empirical examination of controlled processes in their relation to conscious awareness is just at its infancy, and many interesting questionsand hopefully answersstill lie ahead of us. Two such questions concern the veracity of the trichotomy (e.g., are there processes that fall under the third category?) and understanding the brain and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these different types of processes. This promises to be a difcult and complicated road, but the ramications of this enterprise for our understanding of central notions, such as conscious awareness, control, choice, and will, may make the journey worth our while.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to John Bargh, Ed Smith, Melissa Ferguson, Alexander Todorov, Jonathan Cohen, Henk Aarts, Yaacov Trope, and Jim Uleman for stimulating discussions of the ideas presented herein. I would also like to thank Eva Walther, K. C. McCulluch, and Ravit Levy for their feedback and helpful comments. Preparation of this chapter was made possible by grant 846/03 from the Israeli Science Foundation.

Notes1. There is an oddity in these terms that is quite striking: Every process that occurs automatically falls under the category of automatic processes (what else?). But, strangely enough, not every process that is being controlled falls under the category of controlled processes. (Arent all processes controlled by something? Cf. Dennett, 1984.) Thus, for example, the control of routine actions such as typing does not make typing a controlled process. On the contrary, typing is widely considered an automatic process (Norman & Shallice, 1986). This imbalance taps into complex conceptual issues regarding the meaning of control that need to be carefully sorted out, and I start doing so in the epilogue. In the meantime, I use control to refer to that kind of control that results in controlled processes. 2. Needless to say, innumerous functions and operations are necessary for succeeding in tasks of this sort. These include, for example, the ability to hear and to see, to comprehend verbal information, to form intentions and to follow them, to delicately move ngers, and so forth. Here, and in similar analyses in the text, I focus on those functions that seem to characterize WM. 3. The notion of aha-less insights might seem odd at rst. However, the identication of nonconscious correlates of prima facie conscious phenomena is far from new, and characterizes many research programs in cognitive science.

Nonconscious Control and Implicit Working Memory 217

4. Dening the notion of a rule is a task that cannot be undertaken here. I concur with Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, and Vishton (1999, p. 77), who suggest that if a system learns open ended abstract relationships for which we can substitute arbitrary items, it thereby learns a rule. These abstract relations include, among other things, equations such as Xx+1 = Xn + 2 and type-token relations that allow for generalizing the characteristics of the type to new tokens. 5. The exact questions are detailed elsewhere (Hassin et al., 2004). It is important to note, however, that we asked participants about awareness of rules both in mathematical forms and in visual forms (that is, visual patterns created by the ve disks in a given set). 6. The only other difference pertains to the rules used in the experiment. Each block of sets was composed of 10 rule sets, 10 broken rule sets, 10 control sets, and 70 random sets (instead of 7, 7, 7, and 49, respectively, in Experiment 1). 7. I use behavior in a wide sense that includes real life behaviors such as discrimination on the one hand, and laboratory behaviors such as key presses on the other.

222 Basic Mechanisms

INTENTION AND THEORY OF MIND

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The ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mental states is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution. Having an appreciation for the workings of the mind is considered a prerequisite for natural language acquisition (Baldwin & Tomasello, 1998), strategic social interaction (McCabe, Smith, & LePore, 2000), reexive thought (Bogdan, 2000), and moral development (Hoffman, 1993). The initial research on representations of mental states was sparked by the hypothesis that apes, too, have such a theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978), but more recent theories and evidence suggest that the evolutionary emergence of a genuine theory of mind occurred after the hominid split off and may thus be uniquely human (BaronCohen, 1999; Malle, 2002; Povinelli, 1996, 2001; Tomasello, 1998). The ability to reason about mental states has been called a theory of mind because it shares some features with scientic theories (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Wellman, 1990): It postulates unobservables, predicts them from observables, and uses them to explain other observables. This model of theoretical inference is often contrasted with a model according to which people deal with other minds by simulating, in their own minds, what is going on in the other person (Goldman, 1989, 2001; Gordon, 1986; see also Blakemore & Decety, 2001). However, the two approaches are compatible if we regard simulation as one of several processes involved in attributing mental states (another being inference) and if we recognize that both processes rely crucially on a conceptual framework of mental states and their relation to behavior. I will thus refer with the convenient phrase theory of mind to this conceptual framework of mind and behavior, allowing a variety of cognitive processes, such as simulation or inference, to make use of the framework (see Malle, 2001).

225

In social psychology, considerations of others mental states have often been treated as a special case of dispositional inference, akin to imputing traits, or merely as a precursor to imputing traits (Jones & Davis, 1965; Shaver, 1975). Mental states are comparable to traits in that they are unobservable constructs, but they have a number of unique features. First, mental states are conceptualized in folk psychology as events that actually occur in a distinct domainthat of minds or subjective experience; by contrast, the location and nature of traits are left fairly unspecied and abstract. Second, perceivers expect mental states of other agents to be roughly of the same nature as their own mental states and therefore use their own minds to simulate others mental states, whereas they do not use their own personality to simulate others traits. Third, and most important, reasoning about mental states is part of a unique and sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and links them up to behavior (DAndrade, 1987; Malle & Knobe, 1997a). The nature and elements of this framework of mind and its central functions for social cognition are the topic of this chapter.

Theory of Mind as a Conceptual Framework

A conceptual framework can be regarded as a cognitive capacity that operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides (by means of classication and process initiation) the framing or interpretation of that cognition. This framing process is unconscious in an interesting way. Most unconscious processes perform roughly the same functions as do corresponding conscious processes; they just do it more efciently. (Therein lies the appeal of much modern research on the unconscious, which shows that plenty goes on below the awareness threshold that nevertheless is quite similar to what goes on above the threshold.) But a conceptual framework performs a function that no specic conscious or unconscious process can perform; rather, it is presupposed by these processes. Take the case of a perceiver who notices another person pull out his wallet in front of a cashier. Without a conceptual framework of mind and behavior, the perceiver would not understand what the larger objects interaction with the smaller object means. She would also be rather ineffective at predicting the other large objects likely response. With a framework of mind and behavior, however, perceivers can parse this complex scene into fundamental categories of reaching, grasping, and exchanging (Baird & Baldwin, 2001; Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001), and after acquiring the pertinent cultural knowledge, they elaborate their interpretation into the script of paying (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Peoples theory of mind thus frames and interprets perceptions of human behavior in a particular wayas perceptions of226 Intention and Theory of Mind

agents who can act intentionally and who have feelings, desires, and beliefs that guide their actions (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990). When this framing and interpretation are lacking, as in the case of autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, 2000; Leslie, 1992), the resulting social perception is strangely mechanical and raw. One autistic person (in a fascinating e-mail discussion about theory of mind) reports:I know peoples faces down to the acne scars on the left corners of their chins and what their eyes do when they speak, and how the hairs of their eyebrows curl, and how their hairlines curve around the tops of their foreheads. . . . The best I can do is start picking up bits of data during my encounter with them because theres not much else I can do. Its pretty tiring, though, and explains something of why social situations are so draining for me. . . . That said, Im not sure what kind of information about them Im attempting to process. (Blackburn, Gottschewski, George, & L , 2000)

What seems to be missing, as another autistic discussant remarks, is an automatic processing of people information. The data come in, but they cannot be interpreted in a parsimonious way using concepts of agency and mind. Instead, it is all processing abstract concepts and systemsmuch like computer programs or physical forces (Blackburn et al., 2000). Or, as one discussant put it, autistic people who are very intelligent may learn to model other people in a more analytical way. This mechanical, analytical mode of processing, however, is very tiresome and slow: Given time I may be able to analyze someone in various ways, and seem to get good results, but may not pick up on certain aspects of an interaction until I am obsessing over it hours or days later (Blackburn et al., 2000). How is it possible that some people interpret social information so effortlessly while others struggle to nd meaning in it? It has been known for some time that human cognition relies heavily on associative structures such as schemas and scripts that simplify encounters with complex stimuli (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Schank & Abelson, 1977). But these structures are characterized as a form or process of representation that is so generally applicable that it does not constrain (or code for) the content that it represents. On the level of cognitive organization, then, the schema of a social action such as paying looks just like the schema of a rainstorm brewing. What is then social about social cognition? The answer usually points to the type and complexity of objects that are at stakesocial cognition, in short, is cognition of social objects such as people, relations, groups, and the self (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Schneider, 1991). But the category of a social object is precisely what general cognitive structures, content-free as they are, cannot easily identify or distinguish from nonsocial objects. How does a general cognitive process know, as it were, that it deals with another personFolk Theory of Mind 227

rather than a lifeless object? (One can easily see the adaptive importance of such a discrimination.) To perform this discrimination fast and efciently, the human mind appears to rely on a conceptual framework that classies certain stimuli into basic social categories. Details aside, objects that are selfpropelled are classied into the category of agent (Premack, 1990), the coordinated movements of an agent are classied into the category of action (Wellman & Phillips, 2001), and so forth. This category system develops early in childhood, presumably aided by an innate sensitivity to certain stimulus congurations in streams of behavior (Baldwin & Baird, 1999; Dittrich & Lea, 1994; Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Bro, 1995; Woodward et al., 2001; see chapter 10, this volume). Once in place and well practiced, the category system can be activated very easily, as Heider and Simmel (1944) have shown with stimuli as simple as triangles that move around in space, and it can be applied to complex objects such as machines or computers (Dennett, 1987; Nass & Moon, 2000).1 A theory of mind is thus a framework through which certain perceptual input is interpreted or conceptualized as an agent, an intentional action, or a belief; moreover, it frames and directs further processing that is promptly performed on this input (e.g., an inference of the agents motive for the action). People with a decient theory of mind, by contrast, might take in all the information that is available (facial features, body movements, etc.), but they lack the network of concepts that would allow them to interpret with ease and swiftness the meaning of this information (see Baron-Cohen, 1992). If the conceptual framework of mind and behavior, once developed to maturity, is presupposed by any specic conscious or unconscious cognition of human behavior, then this framework resembles Kantian categories of (social) perceptionthat is, the fundamental concepts by which people grasp social reality. Let me explore this parallel a bit further. Kant (1787/1998) postulated a number of categories that the human mind applies to the perception of objects (among them space, time, causality, and substance). These categories, Kant argued, are not just arbitrary frames of perception but the very conditions of the possibility of perception. By analogy, the concepts of a theory of mind would then be the conditions of the possibility of social cognition. This should not be taken as a logical claim (i.e., that to posit social cognition without a theory of mind would be a formal contradiction); rather, we may say that this framework provides the concepts in terms of which social cognition and interpretation have proven effective for dealing with other human beings. This view also allows for cases in which these concepts are missing (as in autism, but also in certain forms of frontal brain damage, and in other animals) and for cases in which the concepts have not yet developed (as in very young children). Both types of cases are highly instructive as evidence for the claim that theory of mind is a domain-specic structure or module (e.g.,228 Intention and Theory of Mind

Baron-Cohen, 1995; Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994; Leslie, 1995; Wellman, 1990). For example, even though autistic children have enormous difculties with reasoning about mental states, they show average or above-average capabilities in causal reasoning about physical events (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; for reviews see Baron-Cohen, 2000; Leslie, 1992). However, theory of mind is not an isolated module either. Executive control appears to play a role in mental-state reasoning (Carlson, Moses, & Hicks, 1998; Hughes, 1998), and introspection may be involved in it as well (Goldman, 2001). Moreover, the capacity for language is linked to theory of mind in both development and evolution (Malle, 2002). For example, a rudimentary appreciation of others attention focus and communicative intentions is involved in early word learning (Baldwin, 1993), but mastery of certain syntactic structures may be a prerequisite for the realization that beliefs are subjective representations of reality (De Villiers, 2000). Unfortunately, research has focused primarily on cases in which theory of mind is either missing or not yet fully developed. It appears that the capacities to simulate and reason about mental states are taken for granted among adult social perceivers, and only the absence of this capacity attracts attention among ordinary folk or psychologists. In particular, research on the fundamental assumption that others are agents who act on the basis of mental states is not a central concern of current social psychology, even though several pioneers of the eld emphasized its importance. Asch (1952), for example, argued that people interact with each other . . . via emotions and thoughts that are capable of taking into account the emotions and thoughts of others (p. 142). Similarly, Heider (1958) emphasized that persons have abilities, wishes and sentiments; they can act purposefully, and can perceive or watch us (p. 21). And Tagiuri, in the foreword to the seminal volume by Tagiuri and Petrullo (1958), proposed to use the term person perception whenever the perceiver regards the object as having the potential of representation and intentionality (p. x). Besides work on empathy and perspective taking (e.g., Davis, Conklin, Smith, & Luce, 1996; Ickes, 1997; Krauss, Fussell, & Chen, 1995), contemporary social psychology includes few investigations into the social perception of mental states. But perhaps this trend is reversing with the growing recognition that mental-state inference is one of the most fundamental tools of social cognition (Ames, in press; Baldwin & Tomasello, 1998; Bogdan, 2000; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001; McCabe et al., 2000; Trabasso & Stein, 1994).

Mind and Behavior

The social-cognitive function of a theory of mind is not just to paint a picture of the mental landscape but to support the understanding of and coordinationFolk Theory of Mind 229

with other peoples behavior, which is achieved by linking behavior to mind (chapter 10). Taking into account the mental states of others helps people make sense of past behavior, permits inuence on present behavior, and allows prediction of future behavior. At the same time, reasoning about the mind is grounded in behavioral evidence to maintain reliability and to permit intersubjective discourse about mental states (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). Without this discourse, mental-state inference would be a private and haphazard endeavor, opening up radical self-other asymmetries instead of facilitating human coordination (Wittgenstein, 1953). The specic connections between mental states and behavior are usually of two kinds: mental states nding their expression in behavior (such as anger shown in the face) and mental states guiding or inuencing behavior (such as an intention to act). Signicantly, behavior that is connected to mental states breaks down into two fundamentally different types (Heider, 1958): intentional action, which is caused by the agents intention and decision; and unintentional behavior, which can be caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agents decision. This distinction is one of the most inuential and illuminating concepts of the folk theory of mind (Malle et al., 2001).

IntentionalityIntentionality is a complex folk concept that species under what conditions people judge a behavior as intentional (or done on purpose).2 This judgment relies on (at least) ve conditions (Malle & Knobe, 1997a; Mele, 2001): An action is considered intentional when the agent had (1) a desire for an outcome, (2) a belief that the action would lead to that outcome, (3) an intention to perform the action, (4) the skill to perform the action, and (5) awareness of fullling the intention while performing the action. Of course, the cognitive process of assessing intentionality often relies on cues and heuristics rather than on a ve-step decision process (e.g., Knobe, 2003). However, the folk concept sets the boundaries for any judgment of intentionality and provides the conditions that settle disputes about an actions intentionality. Some of the individual components of the intentionality concept are themselves powerful tools for making sense of behavior. For example, people differentiate between two motivational states, desire and intention, when explaining, predicting, and inuencing behavior. The two states differ in at least three respects (Malle & Knobe, 2001). First, intentions represent the intenders own action (I intend to A, where A is an action), whereas desires can represent anything (I want O, where O can be an object or state of affairs, including another persons actions or experiences). Second, intentions are

230 Intention and Theory of Mind

based on a certain amount of reasoning, whereas desires are typically the input to such reasoning (I intend to A because I want O). Third, intentions come with a characteristic commitment to perform the intended action whereas desires do not. This distinction has clear consequences for self-regulation, interpersonal perception, and social coordination (including its breakdown in the case of misunderstandings), and future research on these relations would be highly desirable. Another important folk distinction revealed by the intentionality concept is that between desires and beliefs. Desires are strongly embedded in a cultures shared knowledge base (Bruner, 1990) and are considered the primary motives of action (Searle, 1984, chapter 4). This is because desires represent the end toward which the agent strives, whereas beliefs represent the various aspects of the path toward that end (Dretske, 1988). Desires also seem more primitive and easier to infer for children, who learn to attribute desires before they learn to attribute beliefs (e.g., Nelson-LeGall, 1985; Wellman & Woolley, 1990; Yuill & Perner, 1988). Relatedly, most autistic children lack the ability to ascribe beliefs to other people but have less difculty ascribing desires to them (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Among adults, too, beliefs and desires have distinct informational and impression-management functions when used in explanations of action (Malle, Knobe, OLaughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000). The full concept of intentionality plays an important role in a number of social-cognitive phenomena. Frequently mentioned is its impact on the assignment of responsibility and blame for actions (e.g., Shaver, 1985): Agents are more likely to be held responsible or to be blamed when they performed the action in question intentionally. But even for unintentional behaviors and outcomes, the concept of intentionality is at work. Responsibility is still assigned when the outcome is considered to have been preventable (aka controllable; Weiner, 1995) by the agent and when it was his or her duty to do so (Hamilton, 1978). Both preventability and duty entail intentionality, because assigning duties to a person presumes that the person can intentionally fulll them, and preventability presumes that the agent could have intentionally prevented the outcome. Perhaps the most important function of the intentionality concept is to divide all behavioral events into two different domains that are subsequently manipulated in distinct ways by various cognitive tools (e.g., attention, explanation, prediction, blame). Heider (1958) was the rst social psychologist to emphasize that people not only distinguish between intentional and unintentional behavior but also assume two different models of causality for them: Intentional behavior relies on agentic (personal) causality, in which actions are based on the agents reasons, deliberation, and formation of an intention; unintentional behavior relies on mechanical (impersonal) causality, in which no reason or intention is involved.3

Folk Theory of Mind 231

ObservabilityAnother folk distinction leads to different cognitive manipulations: that between publicly observable and publicly unobservable events (Funder & Dobroth, 1987; John & Robins, 1993; Malle & Knobe, 1997b), which is really the distinction between mind and behavior. Considered jointly, the concepts of intentionality and observability generate a map of behavioral events that are relevant to social cognitionthat is, events that people attend to, try to explain, predict, and evaluate (Malle & Knobe, 1997b; Malle & Pearce, 2001).

Attention to and Explanation of Behavioral Events

For convenience, we (Malle & Knobe, 1997b) adopted the following labels for the four regions of the behavioral events map: actions (observable and intentional), mere behaviors (observable and unintentional), intentional thoughts (intentional and unobservable), and experiences (unintentional and unobservable; see table 9.1). The labels themselves are of little signicance, but the conceptual denitions of event types as combinations of intentionality and observability are. That is because the features of intentionality and observability allow us to predict, using a few simple postulates, the patterns of attention to and explanation of these behavioral events under various conditions (e.g., from the actor and the observer role and in communication or private thought). Which Behaviors People Attend To To predict the allocation of attention to the four behavioral events in social interaction, we identied two factors that are known to govern attention allocation in general (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Posner, 1980) and that are important to social interaction as well: epistemic access and motivational relevance. First, to turn ones attention to a particular behavioral event, one needs to have access to itthat is, become in some way aware of it taking place (through introspection, perception, or at least inference). Second, attention to an event increases if it is relevant (i.e., helpful) for the perceivers processing or coordinating the current interaction (e.g., Jones & Thibaut, 1958; Wyer, Srull, Gordon, & Hartwick, 1982). For actors, epistemic access is greater to their own unobservable events than to their own observable events, because they are constantly presentedTable 9.1 Postulated Folk Classification of Behavioral Events IntentionalObservable Unobservable Actions Intentional thoughts

UnintentionalMere behaviors Experiences

232 Intention and Theory of Mind

with their stream of consciousness but cannot easily monitor their own facial expressions, gestures, or posture (Bull, 1987; DePaulo, 1992; Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998). For observers, access is greater to other peoples observable events than to their unobservable (mental) events. We therefore predicted that social interactants attend to observable events more as observers than as actors, whereas they attend to unobservable events more as actors than as observers (Hypothesis 1). In addition, for observers the perceived relevance of intentional events is greater than that of unintentional events. That is because intentional events dene the main business of an encounter (Goffman, 1974), because they are directed at the other person and thereby demand a response, and because they have powerful effects on the others emotions and moral evaluations (Shaver, 1985). By contrast, for actors the perceived relevance of unintentional events is greater than that of intentional events, because unintentional events are not controlled and therefore must be monitored and understood, whereas the execution of intentional events frequently relies on automatic programs (Norman & Shallice, 1986). We therefore predicted, second, that social interactants attend to intentional events more as observers than as actors, and they attend to unintentional events more as actors than as observers (Hypothesis 2). We tested these predictions using an experimental paradigm in which pairs of participants had a conversation and, immediately afterward, were asked to report in writing everything that was going on with their partner (on one page) and with themselves (on another page), in counterbalanced order. The reports were then coded for references to behavioral events (verb phrases that referred to actions, mere behaviors, intentional thoughts, or experiences) and classied according to their intentionality and observability (for details of the coding, see http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/ interact/bevd. html). Results across three studies conrmed both hypotheses (Malle & Pearce, 2001). In conversations among strangers, people reported overall 8 to 10 behavioral events per page (i.e., per perspective), but supporting Hypothesis 1, actors reported 2.3 more unobservable events than did observers, and observers reported 2.3 more observable events than did actors (2 = 5060%).4 In addition, supporting Hypothesis 2, actors reported 1.1 more unintentional events than did observers, and observers reported 1.1 more intentional events than did actors (2 = 1419%). These results suggest that a social perceivers attention to behavioral events is systematically inuenced by the intentionality and observability of those events and by the psychological processes of epistemic access and motivational relevance. Which Behaviors People Wonder About and Explain Given this effect of intentionality and observability on the events people attend to, we should expectFolk Theory of Mind 233

parallel patterns in the events people wonder about and try to explain. Moreover, the principles that guided the predictions in the domain of attention should be similar to those in the domain of wondering and explaining, because the latter two processes imply a focused form of attention, guided by specic goals (Malle & Knobe, 1997b). Thus, for an event to elicit a wondering why (and, under most circumstances, an explanation), three conditions must be met: there must be access (people must be aware of the event to wonder about it), nonunderstanding (people must not already have an explanation for the event), and relevance (people must nd it useful and important to generate an explanation for the event). From these conditions, we derived two predictions about patterns of wonderings: Because of differential access, actors should wonder more often about unobservable than observable events, while observers should wonder more often about observable than unobservable events. In addition, because of differential nonunderstanding, actors should wonder more often about unintentional than intentional events, and because of relevance observers should wonder more often about intentional than unintentional events (for details, see Malle & Knobe, 1997b, pp. 289290). We tested these predictions in two studies, collecting wonderings from memory protocols and twentieth-century novels and systematically coding the intentionality and observability of the events explained (http://darkwing. uoregon.edu/ interact/bev.html). Conrming our predictions, actors wondered about more unobservable events (67%) than observable events (33%), whereas observers wondered about more observable events (74%) than unobservable events (26%). In addition, actors wondered about more unintentional events (63%) than intentional events (27%), whereas observers wondered about more intentional events (67%) than unintentional events (74%). When deriving predictions about patterns of explanations (which are answers to wonderings), we drew a distinction between explanations that are directed to oneself (in private thought) and explanations that are directed to a partner (in communication). Explanations to oneself answer ones own wonderings, so they should show the same actor-observer asymmetries as wonderings do, and data collected from memory protocols and diaries strongly conrmed this prediction. Explanations to other people in communication, however, answer the others wonderings, which come from the observer perspective, and so actors should explain behavioral events about which observers wonder, namely, intentional and observable ones. Observers, meanwhile, still explain the events that they wonder about (also intentional and observable ones), so in communication we expect no actor-observer asymmetries in the kinds of behavioral events people explain, and that was what we found (Malle & Knobe, 1997b). The studies on attention and explanation of behavioral events suggest that one function of the folk theory of mind and behavior is to divide the diversity of234 Intention and Theory of Mind

human behavioral and psychological stimuli into broad classes, such as action, experience, and so on, guided by the concepts of intentionality and observability. These event classes can be more easily managed cognitively by social perceivers, and they are tied to certain assumptions, such as about epistemic access and motivational relevance. Once again, these categorizations into broad event classes and their attendant assumptions in subsequent processing are not a matter of conscious decision (I classify this as an action; I will pay more attention to her actions than to my own actions). Some of the subsequent processes can certainly be put under conscious control, such as when an empathy instruction leads social perceivers to increase their attention to the other persons thoughts and feelings (Davis et al., 1996; Klein & Hodges, 2001; Malle & Pearce, 2001). But the classicatory function of the framework of mind and behavior precedes any particular processing. Because the conceptual presorting that is achieved by a theory of mind guides and frames subsequent processes such as attention and explanation, variations in the conceptual framework itself will have direct effects on peoples attention and explanations. For example, the degree of renement in a theory of mind will inuence the balance of attention allocation to all four behavioral event types. Consider the following remark by an autistic person: It seems impossible to try to focus on my own thoughts or feelings and consider different thoughts or feelings in another person or persons at the same time, especially if I am talking or actively listening to the other person talk (Blackburn et al., 2000). If the process of conceptual classication comes with ease and little ambiguity along the category boundaries, then attention regulation can more easily operate on it, because a directive such as Attend more to the others experiences can be readily implemented. By contrast, if the conceptual classication is onerous, unreliable, and full of vagueness, then attentional regulation will have a difcult time holding on to the correct events and letting attention, explanation, or other processes operate on it.

Folk Explanations of Behavior

After discussing the categorization of behavioral events, I now move to the question of how and for what purpose people explain behavioral events. The folk theory of mind plays a vital role in behavior explanations. Indeed, explaining behavior has sometimes been characterized as the hallmark of folk psychology, even though other processes such as prediction, control, and evaluation are of equal importance. Explanations, however, often come in verbal form and are therefore more amenable to investigation, especially if we want to learn about both their conceptual underpinnings and their role in social interaction.Folk Theory of Mind 235

Explanations and Theory of Mind

A rst issue to address is the functional relation between behavior explanations and theory of mind. Is the function of a folk theory of mind to explain behavior, as most scholars assume, or is the function of explanations to rehearse and advance the theory of mind, as Gopnik (1998) suggests? Gopnik argues that explanations are like orgasm, which does not itself fulll an evolutionary function but makes procreation, the important end, more desirable. However, the analogy becomes questionable when we consider that explanations, unlike orgasms, have many important uses beside making another end (theory advance) more desirable. That is, in addition to advancing theory of mind, explanations help in making sense of concurrent behavior, coordinating joint action, offering clarication, managing impressions, and so on. Furthermore, a theory of mindeven a very advanced oneis not really good for anything unless it improves or expands social performance and hence adaptive tness either of the individual or the group. Behavior explanations constitute one such performance domain that is improved (or made possible) by a theory of mind, with others being prediction and inuence. So the function of a theory of mind is not merely to explain behavior but to facilitate by means of explanations and other toolssuccessful social cognition and social coordination (Malle, 2002). At the same time, the function of explanations is not merely to advance a theory of mind but to facilitate select social tasks, such as understanding, coordination, and impression management. Now I can tackle in more detail the connection between the conceptual framework of mind and the social activity of offering behavior explanations. One possible position is that explanations within a theory of mind make behaviors understandable by identifying their mental causes. This is the position taken by some developmental researchers, who have traced the origin and advancement of explanations throughout the preschool years, demonstrating that children as young as 3 years systematically use psychological (mental state) explanations for human behavior (Wellman, Hickling, & Schult, 1997). However, these researchers group under psychological explanations statements that refer to the agents desires and beliefs but also statements that refer to moods and lack of knowledge (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995, chapter 6; Schult & Wellman, 1997). This global classication is problematic because it loses sight of two types of causation that people distinguish (Buss, 1978; Heider, 1958; Malle, 1999; Searle, 1983): The rst type, intentional causation, refers to mental states as reasons of an agents intentional action; the second may be called involuntary or mechanical causation, which refers to a variety of factors (including mental states) as causes of an agents unintentional behavior. Current developmental studies leave open the question whether 3-year-old children who give mental-state explanations differentiate between mental states as reasons236 Intention and Theory of Mind

(for intentional behavior; e.g., She bought milk because she wanted to make a cake) and mental states as mere causes (for unintentional behavior; e.g., She was nervous because she really wanted to win the game). Perhaps children rst apply mental-state explanations broadly to human behavior and learn to distinguish between reasons and other (mental) causes only after acquiring the full-edged concept of intentionality, around the age of 5 (Shultz & Wells, 1985). Command over this concept involves the differentiation of action-relevant mental states into the triad of belief, desire, and intention, which are partially confounded at an earlier age (chapter 10, this volume; Lyon, 1993; Moses, 2001). This emerging competence involves the understanding that beliefs and desires are combined in a reasoning process to give rise to intentions, which in turn direct action (Malle & Knobe, 1997a), and this understanding amounts to an appreciation of the scope and limits of choice, also acquired around the age of 5 (Kalish, 1998). My goal now is to outline the fully mature system of behavior explanations among adults and its grounding in a theory of mind. This grounding entails that behavior explanations can be constructed only within the conceptual space of the folk theory of mind, and this space is broadly dened by the major distinction between intentional and unintentional behavior and by the specic concepts of reason and intention that underlie the folk notion of intentional action (Malle, 1999, 2001). To begin, I introduce a model of folk explanation that features four modes of explanation differentiated by the kinds of behaviors they explain (intentional vs. unintentional) and the specic aspects of behavior they explain. Then I discuss conditions of use for each explanation mode. I close with an emphasis on both the cognitive and interpersonal functions of explanations, which also illuminate the cognitive and interpersonal functions of the folk theory of mind.

Four Modes of Behavior Explanation

When explaining behavior, people distinguish sharply between intentional and unintentional events (Heider, 1958; Malle, 1999; White, 1991), relying on the folk concept of intentionality (discussed earlier). Unintentional events are explained by referring to mechanical causal factors (e.g., mental states, traits, others behaviors, physical events), and we may label them cause explanations (top of gure 9.1). Traditional attribution models apply fairly well to these cause explanations, because people presume no other link between explanation and behavior besides causality (i.e., no components of intentionality such as awareness or intention). Where traditional attribution theory fails is in its account of how people explain intentional behavioral events. These events are far more complex in that they are dened, according to the folk concept of intentionality, byFolk Theory of Mind 237

Figure 9.1 havior.

Four modes of explanation for unintentional and intentional be-

awareness that accompanies the behavior, an intention that precedes the behavior, and beliefs and desires that precede and rationally support the intention (Malle & Knobe, 1997a). As a result of this complex denition, explanations of intentional behavior break down into three modes, which correspond to three domains people nd worth explaining (gure 9.1): reasons, causal history of reasons, and enabling factors. Reason Explanations The rst and most important mode of behavior explanation comprises the agents reasons for acting (Audi, 1993; Buss, 1978; Davidson, 1963; Locke & Pennington, 1982; Malle, 1999). Reasons are seen as representational states (i.e., mental states that represent an object or proposition) that the agent combines in a process of reasoning that leads to an intention and, if all goes well, to the intended action. The concept of intentionality species two paradigmatic types of reasons that precede the formation of an intention: the agents desire for an outcome and a belief that the intended action leads to that outcome. For example, a student explained why she chose psychology as her major by saying, I want to go to graduate school in counseling psychology [desire]; I think psychology is the right major to have as background for counseling psychology [belief]. In many naturally occurring explanations, other reasons are mentioned in addition to or instead of the paradigmatic ones, such as desires for avoiding alternative outcomes, beliefs about the context, beliefs about consequences, and valuings of the action itself. In all these cases, when an agent forms an intention in light of certain beliefs, desires, or valuings, these mental states constitute the reasons for which the agent forms the intention. Reasons have two dening features, which can be labeled subjectivity and rationality (Malle, 1999, 2001; Malle et al., 2000). Subjectivity refers to the fact that reason explanations cite what explainers consider the agents own subjective reasons for acting. That is, explainers try to reconstruct the deliberations (minimal as they may be) that the agent underwent when forming an238 Intention and Theory of Mind

intention to act and thus take the agents subjective viewpoint when explaining the action. For example, the explanation My father puts pressure on me because he wants many doors to be open to me cites a desire in light of which (the explainer assumes) the father decided to put pressure on her. In another example, Why did she rush off?She thought she was late for her class, we see even more clearly the subjectivity assumption, because the explainer uses a mental verb to explicitly mark the agents subjective belief and implies that, in reality, she probably was not late. It was that subjective belief (and not objective reality) that guided the agents action and thus explains it. Rationality, the second dening feature of reason explanations, refers to the fact that the contents of beliefs, desires, and valuings that are cited as reasons have to hang together so as to offer rational support for the reasonableness of the intention or action that they brought about. Philosophers often speak of a practical reasoning argument that has reasons as its premises and the intention to act as its conclusion (e.g., Harman, 1976; Snare, 1991). The folk concept of rational support is probably not as strict; it demands merely that the intended action is a reasonable thing to do in light of this agents desires and beliefs about fullling those desires. In the example above, the agents action of rushing off was rationally supported by her belief that she was late for class (and it would not have been rationally supported if the agent had thought there was plenty of time left or if she had had no desire to be on time). To make explicit the practical argument in this example, we would need to add (at least) her desire to be on time and her belief that rushing off may help her get to class on time. But one of the fascinating aspects of reason explanations is that the conceptual constraints that the folk theory of mind puts on reasons (particularly the assumptions of subjectivity and rationality) allow explainers to mention a single reason and to trust the audience to ll in the remaining reasons and comprehend why the agent decided to act (Malle, 1999; Slugoski, Lalljee, Lamb, & Ginsburg, 1993). Causal History of Reason Explanations The second domain of explanation refers to factors that lie in the causal history of reasons (CHR) and thus clarify what led up to these reasons in the rst place (Hirschberg, 1978; Locke & Pennington, 1982; Malle, 1994). For example, the statement Anne invited Ben for dinner because she is friendly attempts to explain Annes action, but the content of the explanation (she is friendly) refers to a factor in the causal history of her reasons, not to a reason itself. The explainer would not claim that Anne deliberated, I am friendlyI should invite Ben for dinner; rather, the explainer cites Annes friendly disposition as a relevant causal history or background to whatever specic reasons Anne had for inviting Ben. Causal history explanations do not just cite traits (in fact, only about 20% of them refer to traits) but also include childhood experiences, culture,Folk Theory of Mind 239

past behavior, current physiological states, and situational cues that trigger a particular belief or desire (Malle, 1999). Even though CHR explanations help clarify intentional actions, they do not function like reasons and therefore are not subject to the constraints of subjectivity and rationality. That is, the agent need not have considered or been aware of the causal history factors cited in the explanation (Malle et al., 2000), nor do CHR factors provide rational support for an explained action. Enabling Factor Explanations The third domain of explaining intentional action refers to factors that enabled the action to come about as intended (Malle, 1999). Such enabling factor explanations refer to the agents skill, effort, opportunities, or facilitating circumstances (see McClure & Hilton, 1997; Turnbull, 1986). These explanations take it for granted that the agent had an intention (and reasons) to perform the behavior and clarify not what motivated the agent but how it was possible that the action was successfully performed. For example, She hit her free throws because she had practiced them all week. There is no mention of the agents reasons (or any causal history of those reasons); rather, the explanation claries how it was possible that the agent acted as she had intended. In sum, the concept of intentionality spans four domains of explanation and their corresponding modes. When intentionality is not ascribed, people offer cause explanations. When intentionality is ascribed, people offer either reason explanations, causal history of reason explanations, or enabling factor explanations. These four explanation modes have different conceptual assumptions and linguistic features (Malle, 1999; Malle et al., 2000); they can be reliably distinguished when coding naturally occurring explanations (Malle, 1998); and together they comprise a predictively powerful model of folk behavior explanations (Malle, 1999, 2001; Malle et al., 2000; OLaughlin & Malle, 2002).

Social-Cognitive Conditions of Explanation Modes

I now examine the conditions that determine when and for what purposes these distinct modes of explanation are used in social interaction. This exploration illustrates two tight interconnections: between conscious and unconscious processes of explanation choice and between cognitive and interpersonal functions of behavior explanations. The conditions that distinguish between the use of cause explanations and all other explanation modes are straightforward. The primary one is conceptual: the perceived intentionality of the explained behavior. Malle (1999) showed that the rated intentionality of 20 behaviors predicted the choice be-

240 Intention and Theory of Mind

tween cause and reason explanations at r .90. This choice is determined by features of the conceptual framework itself and therefore largely unconscious. The intentionality judgment itself may be difcult, requiring conscious deliberation and a search for further information; but once the perceiver arrives at a judgment of unintentionality, the decision to offer a cause explanation is conceptually bound. The second condition that invites cause explanations is motivational in nature: the regulation of blame for socially undesirable behaviors. When an agent performs a socially undesirable behavior that could be seen as either intentional or unintentional (e.g., hitting ones opponent during racquetball), the agent will tend to offer cause explanations (e.g., I didnt see you), because they portray the behavior as unintentional (Malle, 1999), and thereby limit the amount of assigned blame. This decision process can be conscious (when the explainer effortfully creates a favorable impression) or unconscious (when the explainer deceives himself or herself into believing that the behavior was in fact unintentional). More complex is the set of conditions that determine whether, given that a performed behavior is perceived as intentional, explainers offer a reason explanation (the default option for about 80% of explanations), a CHR explanation, or an enabling factor explanation. Research documents both cognitive and motivational conditions for this selection among explanation modes (see table 9.2).

Reasons, CHRs Enabling factors

CHR = causal history of reason.

Folk Theory of Mind 241

Cognitive ConditionsA rst cognitive condition is the type of wondering the explainer experiences when searching for an explanation. When the explainer tries to nd out what motivated or instigated the behavior at hand, we may call this a What-for? wondering (best answered by offering reason explanations) or more generally a Why? wondering (best answered by offering reason or CHR explanations). By contrast, when the explainer tries to nd out what made a particular intentional action possible, we may call this a How-possible? wondering, and it is best answered by offering enabling factor explanations. Research shows that How-possible? wonderings are triggered by difcult or extreme behaviors (e.g., artistic or athletic accomplishments) and by behaviors whose motives are obvious (in the given context). In Malle et al. (2000, Study 3), for example, difcult/obvious behaviors elicited enabling factor explanations in 40% of cases, whereas easy/nonobvious behaviors elicited enabling factors in only 6% of cases. Similar results, though cast in a different terminology, were reported by McClure and Hilton (1997). An even more powerful cognitive condition of selecting explanation modes is the type of information the explainer has available about the agent and the action (Malle, 2001; OLaughlin & Malle, 2002). Why-questions about intentional actions typically focus on a specic agentaction unitfor example, Why did Phil [agent] wash the dishes after the party [action]? Reason explanations, such as, He wanted the kitchen clean in the morning, are the default response to such questions (Malle, 1999; Malle et al., 2000). Reasons are specic to the agent (they are the presumed subjective mental states that the agent considered when forming the intention to act), and they are specic to the action (they rationally support this particular action). When explainers do not have such specic information about the particular agent performing the particular action, they try to recruit general information that is available about the type of agent or the type of action performed. General informationfor example, about the agents traits or group memberships, the situational context, or the historical background of the actionis expressed in CHR explanations. For example, Phils washing the dishes may be explained by saying, He is a neurotic cleaner. Or, in a conversation between two teenagers, the question Why didnt she speak to him? was explained by the reply The dynamics of their relationship have always been peculiar. In such cases, explainers apparently do not know the agents specic reasons for performing the action in question. But they have general information available about the type of agent or the type of action performed, and they use this general information to construct a CHR explanation. In support of this role of information availability, we found that people consistently use more CHR explanations when explaining other peoples behavior than when explaining their own (Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2004), pre242 Intention and Theory of Mind

sumably because people rarely have access to others specic reasons. In addition, people use more CHR explanations when explaining group actions than when explaining individual actions, because people tend to have more general than specic information available about groups (OLaughlin & Malle, 2002). Both of these cognitive conditionstype of wondering and type of information availableare likely to engage both conscious (effortful) and unconscious (automatic) processes. On the one hand, an explainer may consciously assess the specic context of the behavior in question, the information demanded by this context, and the availability of this information. On the other hand, these assessments are automatically fed into the conceptual framework of explanations, guiding the choice between the distinct modes of reason, CHR, and enabling factor explanations. As often pointed out, such routine aspects are well executed by unconscious processes, whereas the contextually specic information assessments require some amount of effortful attention.

Motivational ConditionsThe predominant motivational condition of selecting explanation modes is impression management. By crafting certain types of explanation, people are able to manage both their self-presentations and their portrayals of others. Self-presentation concerns have an obvious impact on explanations (Scott & Lyman, 1968; Tedeschi & Reiss, 1981), but this impact is not limited to a choice between person causes and situation causes, as attribution researchers have suggested (e.g., Bradley, 1978; Miller & Ross, 1975).5 When explaining intentional behavior, people increase their use of reasons, especially belief reasons, when they want the agent (self or other) to appear rational (Malle et al., 2000, 2004), and they prefer CHR explanations to dampen the appearance of the agents deliberation and responsibility (Nelson & Malle, 2000; Wilson, 1997). When explaining group actions, people offer reason explanations to portray a group as jointly acting (OLaughlin & Malle, 2002) and thus perhaps as more threatening (Abelson, Dasgupta, Park, & Banaji, 1998; Malle, 2004). Finally, a number of philosophers have suggested that reasons mark an actions moral worth, whereas enabling factors, such as intelligence or skill, do not (Foot, 1978; Kant, 1785/1998). We would therefore expect that explainers who want to portray an agent as morally worthy will offer reasons, whereas explainers who want to portray the agent as capable will offer enabling factors. For example, a professors behavior of giving especially clear lectures might either be explained with a reason (e.g., because she wants students to really understand) and elicit moral praise, or it might be explained with an enabling factor (e.g., because she is very intelligent), eliciting a positive but probably not moral impression.Folk Theory of Mind 243

None of these decisions entails a conscious thought of the sort I should offer a reason rather than a CHR factor. People do not have an explicit conception of these different explanation modes, even though they reliably distinguish between them implicitly (Malle, 1999). What people are conscious of is, again, the situationally specic demands and certain goals of dealing with them (e.g., I should appease them). The routinized framework of behavior explanations then provides the conceptual and linguistic tools that implement these demands and goals by means of particular modes of explanation. Because behavior explanations are often embedded in conversation (Hilton, 1990; Kidd & Amabile, 1981; Malle & Knobe, 1997b), another important motivational condition of choosing among explanation modes is audience designthe explainers communicative adjustment to the interest, knowledge, or expectation of the audience (Clark & Carlson, 1982; Fussell & Krauss, 1992; Higgins, McCann, & Fondacaro, 1982; Zajonc, 1960). For example, listeners can experience different types of wondering, and explainers have to choose an explanation mode that answers the listeners specic wondering. These wonderings are most clearly expressed in explicit question formulations: Why? For what reason? How was this possible? (Malle et al., 2000; McClure & Hilton, 1998). In one study, participants offered 95% enabling factor explanations in response to the question How was this possible? but only 10% in response to the question For what reason?6 Once again, conversational demands are often effortfully processed if they are situationally specic and if they require ne-tuning of the message, but the implementation of the explanation in terms of particular modes and linguistic formulations will be largely automatic. Audience design entails conformity to general conversational maxims (Grice, 1975), which are so well practiced that they are heeded automatically. When asked a why-question, people are expected to avoid giving obvious explanations, too many explanations, uninformative explanations, or no answer at all. Obeying these maxims is likely to have direct consequences for the modes of explanation people choose. For example, when they explain intentional actions of aggregate groupswhose members act independently and probably for very different reasonsexplainers aim at parsimony. As a result, they prefer to offer CHR explanations, citing one or two factors that preceded and brought about the abundance of individual reasons among members of the group (OLaughlin & Malle, 2002).

DiscussionThree general points concerning the choice among explanation modes are worth discussing. First, if folk explanations of behavior rely on key conceptual244 Intention and Theory of Mind

components of the folk theory of mind (e.g., the concept of intentionality, the distinction between beliefs and desires) and if a person lacks these concepts, then the persons choice of explanation should be reduced to one simple mechanical explanation mode. The following self-description of an autistic adult lends support to this hypothesis: I assumed that everything is predetermined and that adults were taking care of us according to some sort of program, without their own decision making (Blackburn et al., 2000; see also BaronCohen, 1992). Of course, systematic research on autistic childrens behavior explanations is needed to test this hypothesis. A second point concerns the microstructure of choosing between explanation modes, in which conscious representations (e.g., of the audience and its demands, of ones own curiosity) blend in gracefully with unconscious processes (e.g., reliance on conceptual assumptions and automatic choice of words when constructing a specic explanation). The division of labor between conscious and unconscious processes might appear roughly as follows: The unconscious apparatus of folk explanation is a toolbox (of conceptual assumptions and cognitive routines) whose tools are automatically assembled (e.g., put into words) before use. This toolbox represents a stable, reliable part of social cognition. By contrast, conscious representations track the momentto-moment uctuations in the context (and in oneself) and repeatedly converge on macro choices (e.g., to offer an explanation) that are then translated into the microelements of appropriate conceptual structure, wording, and so on. These translations are much like buttons or switches on a stereo amplier, each of which has a broader meaning (e.g., increasing volume, selecting a source) and translates that meaning into a complex, low-level operation that reliably gets the job done. The third point is that the conditions of choosing explanation modes depict explanations both as a cognitive tool (to answer ones own wondering) and as a social tool (to manage impressions and adapt to an audience). This duality of functions also exists at other levels of analysis (Malle, 2004). For example, reason explanations have several specic features, among them the type of reason cited (referring either to a belief state or a desire state) and the linguistic marking of that state with a mental-state verb (I thought, she wanted). Knowing the agents specic belief or desire reasons, a social perceiver can more easily understand and predict the agents behavior, thus using explanations as a cognitive tool. But agents who explain their own behavior also use the different types of reasons for managing the audiences perception of their rationality and blameworthiness (Malle et al., 2000; Nelson & Malle, 2000). Likewise, when people explain others behavior, they use mental-state verbs to emphasize that these are the agents (and not some commonly accepted) reasons, thus distancing themselves from the particular reason (e.g., Why is she not eating any dessert? She thinks shes been gaining weight; Malle et al., 2000).Folk Theory of Mind 245

The fundamental duality of cognitive and social function characterizes not only modes and features of folk explanations but also the folk theory of mind as a whole, which is a conceptual apparatus that helps people solve cognitive as well as social tasks. I have pointed to several cognitive tasks, including classication of behaviors as intentional or unintentional, regulation of attention to behavioral events, and explanation as well as prediction. Among social tasks, I mentioned interpersonal inuence and persuasion, impression management (of self and others), and communicative design. It should not be surprising that this diversity of tasks and functions requires far more than a system of causal reasoning or trait/situation attribution; it requires an interwoven framework of folk concepts that tie behavior to mind and thus make behavior intelligible, predictable, and socially defensible.

ConclusionThe theoretical perspective of social cognition as theory of mind has been underrepresented in recent social-psychological thinking, despite its afnity with Heiders (1958) groundbreaking investigations. Perhaps its representation will increase once sufcient data are amassed that favor, for example, a folk-theoretical model of behavior explanations over the traditional trait and causal attribution models (e.g., Malle, 1999, 2004; Malle et al., 2000; OLaughlin & Malle, 2002). But the theory of mind perspective is more than a replacement of attribution theory. Rather, it directs the study of social cognition to the fundamental concepts by which people organize the social world, concepts that guide all other (conscious and unconscious) processing of human behavior and experience. The theory of mind perspective also makes clear what is uniquely social about social cognition: a mentalistic conceptual framework of human behavior that can evolve and develop only within a social environment (Dunn, 1999; Whiten, 1999), whose primary function is to improve social coordination (Humphrey, 1976; Malle, 2002), and whose most reliable trigger is ongoing social interaction (Ickes, 2002). While illuminating the uniqueness of human social cognition, the theory of mind perspective also links social psychology to other disciplines that are concerned with human cognition of mind and behavior, such as developmental psychology, primatology, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy (Carruthers & Smith, 1996; Greenwood, 1991; Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998; Malle et al., 2001; Rosen, 1995). From this perspective, then, a full understanding of the new unconscious includes the folk-conceptual unconscious as an essential part of social cognition, which itself ranges from the most fundamental conceptual assumptions about mind and behavior to the most sophisticated assessments of ongoing social interaction.246 Intention and Theory of Mind

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported by NSF CAREER award SBR-9703315. I am grateful to Dan Ames, John Bargh, and Jim Uleman for their comments on a previous version.

Notes1. Heider and Simmels (1944) ndings are probably more indicative of peoples sensitivity to the experimenters intentions (to display geometric gures that move like agents) than indicative of a deep application of theory of mind to circles and triangles (Malle & Ickes, 2000). More interesting are extensions to natural phenomena (including deities) and machinery. Some scholars regard these extended uses as violating the domain specicity and modularity of a theory of mind (e.g., chapter 11). A defender of modularity might argue, however, that evolutionary and developmental primacy is critical for domain specicity, and the data do at least not speak against this primacy. Extended applications such as those to natural phenomena and machines are surely not ruled out by a domainspecic framework but may show its powerful capacity to reorganize thinking and reasoning about the world. 2. The term intentionality has two quite different meanings. Brentano (1874/ 1973) introduced it as a technical term that was henceforth used to refer to the property of all mental states as being directed toward something. Desires, for example, may be directed toward attractive objects, and beliefs toward states of affairs (Lyons, 1986; Searle, 1983). Second, intentionality is the property of actions that makes ordinary people and scholars alike call them purposeful, meant, or done intentionally. It is this second sense that I am discussing here. 3. Heiders distinction between the two modes of causalitypersonal (intentional) and impersonal (unintentional)is typically misrepresented as one between person causes and situation causes for any kind of behavior (Malle, 2004; Malle & Ickes, 2000). This misunderstanding is perhaps the fundamental aw of standard attribution theory, to which I return in more detail below. 4. The reported differences represent the actual interaction effect, computed after removing main effects (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1989). 5. When people offer cause explanations of unintentional behaviors or outcomes (such as failure, damage, accidents, etc.), they choose between causes of various typesperson versus situation, stable versus unstable, global versus specic, controllable versus uncontrollable. Theories that model these choices (e.g., Fincham, Beach, & Nelson, 1987; Weiner, 1986) are clearly of psychological signicance, but they do not apply the conceptually more complex choices between modes of explanation for intentional behavior. 6. The reported numbers are for difcult behaviors. For easy behaviors, the corresponding numbers were 22% in response to How was this possible? and 0% in response to For what reason?, attesting to the strong inuence of the cognitive condition of explanations discussed earlier.

Folk Theory of Mind 255

10The Development of the Intention Concept: From the Observable World to the Unobservable MindJodie A. Baird and Janet Wilde Astington

Intentions are everywhere: in action (a lovers embrace), in conversation (an unseemly comment), even on paper (the dimpled chad of a presidential election ballot). As Premack and Woodruff (1978) remark, It seems beyond question that purpose or intention is the state we impute most widely (p. 515). But what does it mean to say that someone has an intention? And on what basis are attributions of intention made? Drawing on literature from philosophy and psychology, we dene intention, highlighting the complexities of this concept and pointing to features that distinguish intention from related concepts such as desire and action. We then review the literature on the development of the intention concept in infancy and early childhood. Our treatment of the literature reveals that a complete appreciation of intention is acquired only gradually and is characterized by a shift from inferences based on the observable to those based on the unobservable. In a nal section, we argue that language development plays an important role in this shift in childrens understanding.

The Complexities of Intention

Intentions are, at the same time, obvious and enigmatic. In their simplest form, intentions are the stuff actions are made of. Someone who is running has the intention to run; someone who is walking has the intention to walk. Intentions-in-action, as Searle (1983) calls them, arise spontaneously as an actor engages in bodily movement. They require no premeditated reasoning or forethought; rather, they emerge as a by-product of behavior. Searle distinguishes intentions-in-action from prior intentions, which are mental states256

that precede and motivate action. Prior intentions are formed on the basis of desires and beliefs, and provide the reasons for acting. Consider Georges intention to buy a car. His intention reects a desire for a given outcome (the freedom to go where he wants, when he wants), and a belief that the intended action will lead to that outcome (owning a car will give him that freedom). Critically, intentions specify how the desired outcome will be achieved. That is, if Georges aunt bequeaths him a car, his desire for automotive freedom will be satised, but his intention to purchase a vehicle will remain unfullled. This example points to one of the features that distinguish intention from desire. Intentions and desires are similar in that they are both conative attitudes (Malle & Knobe, 2001) that may launch an agent into action. Intentions and desires can also be identied as representational mental statesthat is, they express an attitude toward a content, that which is intended or desired (Searle, 1983). Moreover, their satisfaction depends on changes in the world coming to match the intended or desired outcome. However, for intentions, the manner in which the outcome is achieved is relevant. As Astington and Gopnik (1991) explain, If I want someone to be dead, my desire will be satised no matter how he dies. If I intend to kill someone, my intention will not be carried out unless I act on that intention and murder him (p. 45). Searle (1983) designates this the causal self-reference of intention; in other words, intentions cause the actions they represent. Malle and Knobe (2001) outline several other features that distinguish intention from desire. For one, intentions and desires differ in terms of content. Desires generally have as their content outcomes (e.g., Sarah wants to have a birthday party), whereas intentions primarily have as their content actions (e.g., she intends to make a cake) that are undertaken to achieve some outcome. In both cases, the outcomes are goal states or goals, that is, the end result that is the object of the desire or intention. Thus, both desires and intentions represent goal states, but intentions are critically different in that they also represent the means to achieving the goal. That is to say, the content of a desire is a goal, and the content of an intention is a goal-directed action. As a consequence of these differences in content, intentions and desires have different explanatory functions: Intentions usually communicate information about what an agent is going to do, whereas desires communicate information about why he or she is going to do it. The content of intentions differs from that of desires in at least two other ways. First, one can only intend what one believes to be possible (Moses, 1993, 2001). Second, intentions are typically directed at the intenders own action; one cannot intend the uncontrollable (e.g., another persons actions or acts of nature). In contrast, there are no such constraints on the content of desires. Desires can be directed at anything, including the impossible (e.g., wanting to live forever) and uncontrollable (e.g., wanting sunny weather).The Development of the Intention Concept 257

Malle and Knobe (2001) further suggest that, because of their differences in content, intentions and desires operate differently in the chain of reasoning that leads to intentional action. In particular, intentions typically represent the output of reasoning, whereas desires often are the input to reasoning. For example, a desire to help the homeless (input) may lead to an intention to volunteer at a soup kitchen (output). In line with these different roles in reasoning, intentions and desires differ with respect to their commitment to action. Intentions represent a commitment to act. For example, having formed an intention to marry Karen (and having obtained her agreement), Anthony is settled on that course of action. He need not continue to deliberate on his decision (intentions typically resist reconsideration), nor can he form an intention to marry someone else (intentions constrain other intentions; Bratman, 1987). Moreover, Anthonys reputation will likely suffer if he announces his intention to marry Karen and then jilts her at the altar (an agent may be sanctioned if intentions that are publicly expressed go unfullled; Malle & Knobe, 2001). Desires, in contrast, need not entail any commitment to act; Anthony could secretly yearn to marry Karen without ever acting upon that longing. Due to their causal role in motivating action, intentions are predictive of others behavior. That is, if peoples intentions are known, their probable subsequent actions can often be inferred. Likewise, peoples actions are a rich source of information about their intentions. Intentions are not, however, isomorphic with actions; rather, they stand in a many-to-many relation (Baldwin & Baird, 1999; Searle, 1984). That is, one and the same physical action (e.g., administering a drug) may be motivated by different intentions (e.g., to kill or to restore health). Likewise, one and the same intention (e.g., to kill) may engender different kinds of actions (e.g., administering a drug or shooting a rearm). As a consequence of this many-to-many relation between actions and intentions, intentions cannot be extracted directly from the behavior stream; too many possible intentions are consistent with any given action. Instead, intentions must be inferred from contextual information (e.g., time and place) and knowledge about the agent (e.g., his beliefs and desires) in addition to action information (Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001). A fully developed understanding of intention allows one to appreciate the somewhat elusive distinctions between intention and related concepts of desire, goal, and action. However, the inability to grasp such subtleties does not imply that one has no understanding of intention. As the following literature review claries, intention is not an all-or-nothing concept; rather, a concept as complex and multifaceted as intention has to be acquired gradually. We begin by reviewing evidence that suggests young infants may have abilities for perceiving action in ways that support an analysis of intentions, even at an age when any real understanding of intention is debatable and, in our view, unlikely. The rst sign of genuine understanding is implicit, appearing258 Intention and Theory of Mind

in the second year of life around the same time infants social and communicative skills begin to ourish. However, childrens early concept of intention is limited to the observable world; they view intention merely as a conative attitudea volitional stateintimately tied to acts and speech acts. It is not until later in the preschool years that children make explicit distinctions among intention, desire, goal, and action, and are capable of understanding intention as a product of the unobservable mind. Our use here of the terms implicit and explicit refers to the way childrens understanding is expressed, that is, rst implicitly in their actions, and later explicitly in what they say and in their responses to verbal questioning. Although this usage maps onto others analyses of implicit/explicit understanding (e.g., Dienes & Perner, 1999; Ruffman, 2000), our purpose here is simply to refer to a distinction between behavioral versus verbal expressions of understanding.

Foundational Skills for Understanding Intentions

In order to make successful attributions of intention, one must distinguish which objects possess intentionsthat is, which objects warrant intention attribution, and which portions of the behavior stream are relevant to an intentional analysis. By the end of their rst year, infants are skilled at both of these discriminations. By 12 months of age, infants can distinguish between agentsthat is to say, objects possessing intentionsand inanimates, and they use this distinction to guide their inferences about and behavior toward those objects. For example, infants as young as 7 months appreciate that humans, but not inanimate blocks, can cause one another to move in the absence of direct physical contact (Woodward, Phillips, & Spelke, 1993). Moreover, infants respond differently to agents versus inanimates, even when these two classes of objects display identical patterns of motion. For example, 12-month-olds readily follow the gaze of objects perceived as agents (i.e., objects that have a face and/or respond contingently to the infant) but fail to follow the same movements performed by nonagentive objects (Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998). Furthermore, infants as young as 6 and 9 months of age assume that a human arm is goal directed when it reaches for something, but they make no such assumption when the reach is performed by an inanimate rod (Woodward, 1998). Around the same age at which they distinguish agents and inanimates, infants also demonstrate sensitivity to the features of action that are relevant to understanding the actors intentions. For example, Woodward (1998) demonstrated that 6- and 9-month-old infants selectively attend to the goal of an actors reach relative to the path of the actors reach. Infants in this study habituated to a reaching event in which a hand grasped one of twoThe Development of the Intention Concept 259

objects on display. Following habituation, Woodward reversed the positions of the objects and presented two test events: one in which the hand followed the same path of motion yet grasped a different object (new goal event), and one in which the hand took a new path of motion yet grasped the same object (new path event). If, during habituation, infants regarded the goal of the actors reach as more signicant than the path of the reach, they should show greater interest or surprise on test trials in which the goal of the reach changed. This is precisely what Woodward found: Infants showed a stronger novelty response (i.e., longer looking times) to new goal trials relative to new path trials. These ndings suggest that infants selectively attend to and remember the features of action that are relevant to the actors intention (for additional evidence, see Wellman & Phillips, 2001; Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001). Woodwards (1998) ndings indicate that, when faced with a discrete action (i.e., reaching for an object), infants readily attend to the intentionrelevant features. However, the task of identifying others intentions is complicated by the fact that human behavior tends to proceed in a continuous ow, lacking pauses to identify boundaries between distinct actions. Nevertheless, recent research indicates that infants as young as 10 to 11 months are sensitive to structure in behavior that coincides with the initiation and completion of intentions. Using a variant of the habituation/dishabituation paradigm, Baldwin, Baird, Saylor, and Clark (2001) showed infants digitized sequences of continuous, everyday action (e.g., a woman reaching to grasp a towel and hang it on a rack). In a familiarization phase, infants viewed the same action sequence repeatedly across several trials. In the subsequent test phase, infants viewed two different versions of the original action sequence, this time with still-frame pauses inserted at certain points in the course of action. The intention-completing test version highlighted the boundaries between intentions with a pause occurring just as the actor completed an intention (e.g., as she nished grasping the towel). The intention-interrupting test version disrupted the structure of the behavior sequence with a pause occurring prior to the completion of an intention (e.g., as the actor reached for the towel). The logic was as follows: If infants are sensitive to the structure of intentional action, they should look longer at the intention-interrupting test version (which violates this structure) than at the intention-completing test version (which preserves this structure). In fact, this is precisely what Baldwin et al. found. Following the familiarization phase, during which their interest in the unjunctured action sequence waned, infants demonstrated renewed interest (i.e., longer looking times) only in response to the intentioninterrupting test version; they showed no such renewed interest in the intention-completing test version. A control study veried that, in the absence of familiarization, infants did not have a starting preference for the intentioninterrupting test videos. These ndings clarify that by 10 to 11 months of260 Intention and Theory of Mind

age, infants are sensitive to structure in behavior that coincides with the initiation and completion of intentions.1 In sum, by the end of their rst year, infants show a variety of abilities that are relevant to the detection of intention in human action. They can distinguish between agents and inanimate objects. They are more sensitive to the goals of an action than the physical movements involved. They are also more sensitive to interruptions in action that occur before a goal is achieved than to interruptions occurring as the goal is achieved. We now turn to the issue of how to interpret these abilities.

Infant Detection of Intention: The Problem of Interpretation

The mechanisms underlying infants abilities to detect intention-relevant structure in action are not yet understood and are the topic of much speculation and discussion (e.g., Baird & Baldwin, 2001; Povinelli, 2001). Povinelli (2001), for example, outlines three possible ways to interpret the ndings from looking-time studies such as those of Woodward (1998) and Baldwin et al. (2001). The rst and most generous of these interpretations is that infants possess a genuine understanding of intention. Proponents of this viewpoint suggest that the human brain is endowed with a system or systems dedicated to the detection and interpretation of intentional action (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Premack, 1990). Such systems are innate, encapsulated, domain-specic parts of the cognitive architecturein other words, modules. Leslie (1987, 1991), building on Fodor (1983), was the rst to argue for a rich, innate endowment underlying childrens understanding of other minds. His theory (e.g., Scholl & Leslie, 1999) posits a modular theory-of-mind mechanism that spontaneously computes the mental states contributing to observed behavior. Although Leslie does not focus specically on the attribution of intention, other modular theorists do. For example, Baron-Cohen (1995) posits an intentionality detector (ID) that comes online in the rst year of life and is triggered by self-propelled stimuli, interpreting such stimuli as agents that possess goals and desires. Baron-Cohens ID is based on Premacks (1990; Premack & Premack, 1995) idea that infants are hardwired to directly perceive certain intentionssuch as the intention to escape connement or to overcome gravityin self-propelled movement. Baron-Cohen argues, however, that ID is triggered by a broader range of motions than Premack suggests. It is a fundamental mechanism attributing (indeed sometimes overattributing) agency and therefore, in his view, intention. A second, more moderate view suggests not that infants are capable of attributing intentions, but that they possess skills for processing action thatThe Development of the Intention Concept 261

will ultimately lead to the construction of genuine understanding. This is the position cautiously adopted by Wellman and Phillips (2001), as well as by Woodward and colleagues (2001), who suggest that infants attention and sensitivity to the intention-relevant features of action provide the basis for later developments in their understanding of intention. The third alternative is that infants ability to analyze action reects the operation of a low-level perceptual system for detecting physical and temporal regularities in behavior (Baird & Baldwin, 2001) that is independent of an understanding of intention (Povinelli, 2001). As Povinelli explains, this interpretation highlights the possibility that the early detection of the structural regularities of behavior are not, strictly speaking, the early manifestation of the uniquely human system for reasoning about intentions (pp. 240241). Rather, Povinelli argues, the system for detecting structure in behavior evolved independently of that for understanding the intentions of others. Evidence for this argument comes from the fact that, while a number of species are capable of detecting structural regularities in behavior, only humans are capable of reasoning about behavior in mentalistic terms. In human development, connections surely emerge between the low-level system for detecting structure in behavior and the high-level system for interpreting intentions (Baird & Baldwin, 2001; Povinelli, 2001). Nonetheless, the presence of structure-detection abilities in infancy does not imply that infants have embarked on genuine understanding. However, those who are reluctant to assume that young infants sensitivity to structure in behavior reects an understanding of intention are convinced by the more sophisticated abilities of children in their second year of life.

Toddlers Implicit Understanding of Intention

By 18 months of age, children demonstrate considerable social and communicative abilities. Childrens rapid development in the realm of social interaction during their second year suggests that they possess real skills for perceiving others intentions. This suggestion is conrmed by a growing number of studies in the domains of language learning, emotional understanding, and imitation, demonstrating that such young children can infer intention from the perceptual features of a persons facial, communicative, or other observable acts.

Language LearningIn any language learning context, speakers provide a number of clues to their communicative intentions. Unfortunately for infants, however, these clues262 Intention and Theory of Mind

are not always presented in isolation. The environment in which new object labels are offered is often cluttered with irrelevant information that may distract infants from the object of interest. In fact, for as many as 30% to 50% of labeling utterances that Western, middle-class infants hear, they are focused on an altogether different object than the one to which the speaker is actually referring (e.g., Collis, 1977). This phenomenon, termed discrepant labeling (Baldwin, 1991), has the potential to undermine language learning: Infants might associate the label they are hearing with the object of their own focus rather than with the object of the speakers focus. However, research by Baldwin (1991, 1993) indicates that infants as young as 18 to 19 months tune into the direction of a speakers gaze, and use this information to successfully infer the referent of a novel label. In her studies, infants heard novel labels for novel objects in two conditions: follow-in labeling, during which the speaker looked at and labeled the object of the infants focus, and discrepant labeling, during which the speaker looked at and labeled an object other than that of the infants focus. In the discrepant labeling condition, infants rst checked and then followed the speakers line of regard to the target object. When subsequently tested for comprehension of the novel label, infants correctly avoided associating the label with the object of their own focus, and instead linked the new word with its appropriate referent. These ndings indicate that by 18 months of age, infants actively seek and successfully use cues to communicative intent when establishing new word-object mappings (see Baldwin & Tomasello, 1998, for a review).

Emotional UnderstandingIn addition to utilizing information about intentions in the domain of language learning, infants recruit similar cues to make sense of others emotional messages. In a study by Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, and Tidball (2001; see also Baldwin & Moses, 1994), for example, 12- and 18-month-old infants were shown two ambiguously valenced toys (e.g., a furry black spider and a moon face with sunglasses), one of which was put within infants reach. As the infant focused on that toy and began to reach for it, the experimenter provided either a positive (e.g., Oh! Nice!) or negative (e.g., Iiuu! Yecch!) affective response. Similar to Baldwins (1991, 1993) follow-in versus discrepant labeling conditions, the experimenter either looked toward the infants toy (joint focus) or the other toy (discrepant focus) while producing the affective label. Infants subsequent responses clearly indicated that they specically linked the experimenters emotion with the toy of the experimenters focus, regardless of which toy they themselves had been focused on at the time the affective label was provided. These ndings reveal infants ability to use cues to attentional focus to discern the intended referent of an emoThe Development of the Intention Concept 263

ImitationStudies of early imitation provide yet another window on infants understanding of intention. In a widely cited study, Meltzoff (1995) showed 18-monthold infants an adult trying and repeatedly failing to complete an action on a novel object. In one demonstration, for example, the adult made three unsuccessful attempts to pull apart a dumbbell. When subsequently given the opportunity to manipulate the object, infants immediately produced the intended action, despite having never before seen the actor achieve that goal. In fact, infants were just as likely to perform the intended action in response to viewing the adults failed attempts as they were in response to a successful demonstration of the target action. However, infants did not reproduce the intended action if the failed attempt was modeled only once (Meltzoff, Gopnik, & Repacholi, 1999). These ndings suggest that, for infants as well as adults (Heider, 1958), seeing repeated attempts at a given action is relevant for inferring the actors intention. Another study of early imitation similarly claries infants ability to comprehend the goal directedness of others behavior. In a study by Carpenter, Akhtar, and Tomasello (1998), 14- to 18-month-old infants watched an adult performing a sequence of two actions (e.g., pulling a handle and spinning a wheel) on a novel object. Both actions produced a salient result (e.g., a toy appeared); however, the actor linguistically marked one action as intentional (There!), and the other as accidental (Whoops!). When subsequently given the object and asked to make it work, infants across the 14to 18-month age span produced the action marked as intentional far more often than the accidental one. Thus, infants not only distinguished the two actions with respect to their intentional status, they apparently viewed intentional events as more informative, or perhaps as more deserving of reenactment, than accidental events (but see Meltzoff et al., 1999). In sum, the ndings reviewed in this section reveal that, by 18 months of age, infants possess an impressive ability to use information from the observable physical world (i.e., others communications and actions) to draw inferences about intentions. However, all of the research discussed has been concerned with childrens implicit understanding of intention, that is, an understanding that is revealed in childrens actions and reactions. This is due, at least in part, to the methodological constraints necessarily imposed on researchers working with such young children, whose linguistic abilities are severely limited (Meltzoff et al., 1999). Once children reach 3 years of age, they can participate in experiments that require verbal skill in one or more264 Intention and Theory of Mind

areas, such as comprehending stories, understanding an experimenters questions, or producing verbal responses. This research reveals childrens more explicit understanding of intention.

Young Preschoolers Explicit Understanding of Intention

Young preschoolers understanding of intention is similar to that of older infants and toddlers insofar as it is based on observable actions and speech acts. However, it is more explicit because during the period from 18 months to 3 years of age, childrens language skills develop rapidly, and they begin to refer to intention and desire. The development of talk about intention is revealed by naturalistic observations of childrens conversations with parents and siblings in the home. Soon after they start to talk, children use will and gonna to refer to their own and others future actions (Gee & Savasir, 1985; Wells, 1979). They also use gonna, interchangeably with wanna, to refer to an immediate future that expresses the childs intention or desire (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995, p. 68; Brown, 1973). In addition, between 2 and 3 years of age, children start to explain and excuse actions using intention terms (e.g., mean, try, on purpose; Bretherton, 1991; Dunn, 1988). Thus, by 3 years of age, children are able to verbalize their understanding of intention, as demonstrated in a number of studies investigating preschoolers ability to distinguish between intentional and accidental events. In a study by Shultz, Wells, and Sarda (1980), for example, children were induced to make mistakes (e.g., in trying to repeat tongue twisters) and subsequently asked whether or not their mistaken behavior was intentional (e.g., Did you mean to do that?). Children as young as 3 years of age could distinguish between intentional and unintentional events for their own behavior as well as for the behavior of others. However, an alternative explanation for these ndings is that 3-year-olds based their judgments on the desirability of the outcome. Because mistakes are inherently undesirable, children might judge them as unintentional on this basis alone. To circumvent this possibility, Shultz and Wells (1985) presented 3-year-olds with an electronic targetshooting game in which the shooter rst selected one of several targets to hit, and then red a shot that hit either the selected target or one of the other targets. In this case, unlike the tongue twister experiment, a given target was neither inherently desirable nor undesirable. Whether or not a target was intended instead depended on the shooters initial choice. However, unknown to the child, the apparatus was rigged so that the experimenter could control which target was actually hit. When asked to determine whether the shooter had meant to hit that target, 3-year-olds reported an intention more often when the outcome matched the shooters stated goal than when it did not. Similarly, Yuill (1984) demonstrated that children as young as age 3 canThe Development of the Intention Concept 265

coordinate goal and outcome information in their judgments of satisfaction. Three-year-olds in her study judged a character who wanted and achieved a certain outcome to be more pleased than a character who achieved, but did not want, the same outcome. The ndings just reviewed suggest that by 3 years of age, children have explicit knowledge of the distinction between intentional and unintentional behavior. This is perhaps not surprising given the abilities of even younger children to make this distinction implicitly (e.g., Carpenter et al., 1998). However, one concern with the aforementioned studies is that childrens success could be explained by a matching strategy (e.g., Astington, 1991; Shultz & Wells, 1985). That is, rather than genuinely understanding intention, children may succeed in these tasks simply by comparing the stated desire or goal with the subsequent outcome. When the desire and outcome match, the action is labeled intentional; when they do not match, it is labeled unintentional. Childrens success, however, is dependent on the desired goal state being made explicit in the experimental context (see next section).

Older Preschoolers Understanding of Intention Based on Unobservables

In studies that preclude the use of a matching strategy by withholding desire or goal information, children do not succeed at distinguishing between intentional and unintentional behaviors until age 5. For example, Smith (1978) asked children aged 4 to 6 years to determine whether voluntary (e.g., walking), involuntary (e.g., sneezing), or object-like (e.g., being pushed by another object) movements were intentional. Four-year-olds tended to regard all types of movement as intentional, whereas 5-year-olds excluded both involuntary acts and object-like movements from the category of intentional action. Moreover, Shultz and colleagues (1980) found that 5-year-olds, but not 3- or 4year-olds, could distinguish intended acts from reexes or passive movements. Finally, Astington and Lee (1991) presented 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds with pairs of stories in which one character intentionally caused an outcome and another character accidentally achieved the same outcome. However, neither story offered any explicit information about the characters desire or goal. In one story, for instance, a girl takes some bread outside, throws crumbs onto the ground, and some birds peck them up. In the paired story, another girl takes some bread outside, the crumbs just happened to drop onto the ground behind her, and some birds peck them up. When asked, Which girl meant the birds to eat the crumbs?, 3-year-olds performed at chance levels, whereas 5-year-olds demonstrated above-chance success at identifying the intentional event.

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On the basis of 3-year-olds poor performance on tasks that preclude the use of a goal-outcome matching strategy, some researchers have suggested that young preschoolers early concept of intention is undifferentiated from their concept of desire (e.g., Astington, 2001; Astington & Gopnik, 1991; Perner, 1991). As discussed earlier, although intentions and desires both represent goal states, intentions are critically different in that they also represent the means to achieving the goal. Thus, children must be able to think separately about the desire for an outcome and the intention to act in a manner that will bring about the outcome. A fruitful way to assess childrens understanding of the distinction between desire and intention is to create scenarios in which an intention is unfullled but the corresponding desire is satised. In one such study (Schult, 2002), children heard stories in which the outcome (a) satised both the actors desire and intention, (b) satised the desire but not the intention, (c) satised the intention but not the desire, or (d) satised neither the desire nor the intention. In one intention-unfullled/ desire-satised story, for example, Becky wanted a new doll and planned to buy it at the store. Before she did so, however, her mom gave her the doll. After the story, children were asked to determine whether Beckys desire and intention were fullled. Specically, children were asked, Did Becky get what she wanted? (desire question) and Did Becky do what she planned to do? (intention question). In response to the desire question, 4-, 5-, and 7-yearolds correctly stated that Becky got what she wanted. However, in response to the intention question, 4-year-olds incorrectly stated that Becky did what she had planned to do. In contrast, 5- and 7-year-olds correctly assessed that her intention had not been fullled. Four-year-olds also had difculty assessing whether or not an intention was fullled in the other discrepant stories (intention-fullled/desire-unsatised), but evidenced no such difculty when the fulllment of intention coincided with the satisfaction of desire. Interestingly, children appear to have as much difculty distinguishing between their own desires and intentions as they do in differentiating intention from desire from a third-person perspective. Phillips, Baron-Cohen, and Rutter (1998; see also Schult, 2002) adapted the target-shooting game introduced by Shultz and Wells (1985) to create instances in which intention and desire did not coincide. Phillips et al.s task included a row of colored cans, some of which contained prizes. Children stated which can they wanted to hit, took aim, and shot toward it. However, the game was secretly rigged so that, although children selected which color to aim for, the experimenter controlled which can actually fell and whether it contained a prize. The childs intention was to hit a particular color; the desire was to get a prize. As in the Schult (2002) study, four conditions were included: two in which the desire and intention coincided (i.e., both satised or neither satised) and two in which the desire and intention did not coincide. In the intention-fullled/

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desire-unsatised condition, for example, the child hit the intended can (e.g., green) but it did not contain a prize. When subsequently asked, Which can did you mean to shoot? The green one or the red one?, 4-year-olds were more likely to say that they meant to shoot the red one. That is, despite having hit the can they said they were aiming for, 4-year-olds reported having intended to hit a different color can when the chosen can did not contain a prize. Five-year-olds, in contrast, accurately reported their initial intention, even when its fulllment did not coincide with the satisfaction of their desire. Further limitations in young childrens concept of intention are revealed in studies that assess their understanding of the distinction between intention and action. As discussed earlier, despite their causal role in motivating action, intentions are not isomorphic with actions. One can pursue a variety of actions to fulll a given intention, and a given action is consistent with any number of possible intentions. In a recent study, Baird and Moses (2001) investigated childrens understanding of the many-to-many relation between intentions and actions by examining 4- and 5-year-olds ability to attribute different intentions to characters performing identical actions. Children heard stories (accompanied by pictures) in which two characters performed the same action (e.g., running), yet had different desires (e.g., to be home for dinner versus to be healthy and strong). Children were asked to determine what each character was trying to do (e.g., get somewhere fast versus get some exercise). Five-year-olds successfully assigned different intentions to the two characters, despite the fact that the characters actions were identical. In contrast, 4-year-olds tended to attribute the same intention to both characters, even though the characters desires clearly differed. A control condition claried that 4-year-olds nevertheless could attribute different intentions to characters performing different actions. However, despite several task simplications, their difculty assigning two intentions to characters performing identical actions persisted, suggesting that young children may not appreciate the distinction between intention and action. In sum, by the end of the preschool years, childrens understanding of intention is quite sophisticated. They can distinguish between intentional and unintentional action even in cases where no information is available on which to match goal and outcome. They can correctly identify cases where desires are satised but intentions are not fullled, and corresponding cases where intentions are fullled but desires are not satised; that is, they recognize the distinction between intention and desire. They also recognize the distinction between intention and action, appreciating that the same action may be motivated by different intentions. In all of these situations, children can talk about the distinctions. Thus, by the end of the preschool years, childrens understanding of intention is explicit and goes beyond inferences based on overt actions and communications.

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What Have 5-Year-Olds Achieved and How Have They Achieved It?The research reviewed in this chapter shows that childrens concept of intention is gradually developed during the early years. The process begins with infants ability to detect intention in action, which is followed by toddlers ability to infer intention from observable actions and speech acts. Young preschoolers can make these inferences explicit in their talk about intention. However, it is not until the end of the preschool years that children understand intention as a product of the unobservable mind, distinct from the desire that precedes it and the action that ensues. Thus, over the rst few years of life there is a shift from understanding expressed in behavior to verbalizable understanding, and a shift from understanding based on the observable world to one based on the unobservable mind. How do these changes come about? In our view, language plays a crucially important role. First, and most obviously, the acquisition of intention terms by 2- and 3-year-olds allows them to refer to intention and to respond to specic questions about peoples intentions. Three-year-olds can verbally distinguish between someone who meant to do something and someone who did not mean to do it. They can talk about something being done accidentally or on purpose, and about what somebody is going to do or is trying to do. Second, and more important, it is not simply that language reveals an understanding that children already possessed, but rather it is instrumental in the development of new understanding (Astington, 1999). Obviously, as the research that we have discussed illustrates, prelinguistic infants and young toddlers have a rich understanding of intentions as they are expressed in observable actions. For example, the 18-month-olds in Meltzoffs (1995) study demonstrated some understanding of prior intention, not just intentionin-action, when they produced the action the adult meant to perform rather than the movement that they actually observed. However, as the research with 3-year-olds illustrates, young childrens intention concept is still imprecisethey conceive of a motivational state that conates intention and desire. Language signicantly inuences and increases childrens understanding by enabling them to rene this concept. They move on from holding a generalized notion of motivation observable in behavior, to conceiving of a representational mental state that is distinct from the desire that precedes it and the action that is taken to achieve the desired outcome. In the mature concept, then, intention occupies an intermediate place in the chain linking desire to outcome, straddling the external world of action and the internal world of the mind. Thus, 5-year-olds achievement lies in their ability to recognize that intention and action are distinct links in the chain, mediating between desire state and outcome. Perner (1991; Perner,

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Stummer, & Lang, 1999) argues that it is the development of metarepresentational ability that underlies this achievement. We agree, but, further, we would contend that language is fundamental to the development of metarepresentation. Metarepresentational ability is marked by the childs understanding that people represent the world in mind, and act on the basis of their representation of the world, even in cases where it misrepresents the actual situation in the world. Language development may be crucial to the development of metarepresentational ability because language provides a format in which the child can represent a persons misrepresentation, in the face of the conicting actual situation that the child perceives. Thus, the ability to metarepresent, which develops toward the end of the preschool years, allows children to think about people mentally representing the world. They then conceive of intention and other mental states, such as belief and desire, as representations that are separate from the real world of objects, events, and actions. Once a child can metarepresent, he or she recognizes that people construct the world in their minds, and that this constructed world is the world in which people act, even when their representation is a misrepresentation of reality. Research investigating the development of metarepresentational understanding has focused on childrens understanding of belief, especially false belief (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). In the classic false-belief task, developed by Wimmer and Perner (1983), a story is acted out for children in which, for example, a boy places his chocolate in a drawer and goes out to play. While the boy is gone, his mother moves the chocolate to the cupboard. The boy then returns, hungry for his chocolate, and children are asked to predict where he will look for it. For the reader, the correct answer should be obvious: The boy will look in the drawer, where he thinks the chocolate is, and not in the cupboard where it actually is. For 3-yearolds, however, the correct answer is not so obvious: Most 3-year-olds predict that the boy will look in the new locationafter all, he wants his chocolate and that is where it is in reality. Around 4 years of age, children begin to understand that people act not on the basis of reality, but rather on the basis of their beliefs about reality. Children who appreciate this fact clearly have metarepresentational understanding. It may be that metarepresentational understanding also underlies the ability to distinguish between desire and intention (Astington, 2001). Threeyear-olds cannot make this distinction because they do not think of a persons desires and intentions as mental representations produced by the individual. Although 3-year-olds can represent different situations, including hypothetical ones, they cannot represent themselves or another person representing the hypothetical situation. Thus, they understand intention by thinking of the goal state as a hypothetical situation and associating the person with that situation (Perner, 1991). They then can judge that the person will act to achieve the goal and will be satised if it is achieved (Yuill, 1984). However,270 Intention and Theory of Mind

in order to distinguish between desire and intention, the child must represent herself or another person representing the hypothetical desired or intended situation. That is, the child has to understand that the action to achieve a goal must be caused by some internal representation of it. In Perners (1991, pp. 219220) terms, in the 3-year-olds view of goal-directed action there are only goals that people have and actions that they can take to achieve those goals. There is only the goal and the action, not the separate notion of the intention to act. The child who can metarepresent can separate these two notions; that is, the intention to act can be understood as a mental state representing that one will act. The representation of the action is not a hypothetical situation but part of the same world, albeit internal, as the action itself. Intention thus connects the internal world of the mind and the external world of action, and the representational mental state can be understood as causally responsible for the action. Now it is possible to think separately of the desire for an outcome and the intention to act to achieve the outcome. Thus, Perner argues, metarepresentational ability underlies a rened concept of intention. In support of this argument, Lang and Perner (2002) demonstrated that there is a close relation between childrens understanding of false beliefs and their understanding that reexive movements (e.g., the knee-jerk reex) are not intentional actions. In their study, false-belief task performance and recognition that the knee jerk is unintentional were strongly correlated, even when controlling for age and verbal ability. Lang and Perner argue that the two are related because in both cases children must understand mental states as representations with causal efcacy. That is, in the false-belief task, it is the characters false belief that causes him to search in the empty location (e.g., the drawer) even though it does not satisfy his desire to nd the chocolate. Similarly, one does not mean to move ones leg when it moves up in the knee-jerk reex, because the movement is not caused by a mental state of intention. Both cases depend on the metarepresentational ability that allows the child to understand how the mind causes actions to occur. This claim, however, leads to a further question: What promotes the development of metarepresentational ability? It is here that we would argue for the crucial role of language. It has been shown that language development precedes and promotes the metarepresentation of belief (Astington & Jenkins, 1999). In this study, 3-year-old children were tested three times over a 7month period. At each time point, general language ability was assessed using a standardized measure of reception and production of syntax and semantics (Hresko, Reid, & Hammill, 1981). Metarepresentational ability was assessed using false-belief tasks. Earlier language abilities predicted later falsebelief task performance (controlling for earlier false-belief task performance), but earlier metarepresentational ability, as measured by the false-belief tasks, did not predict later language test performance (controlling for earlier lanThe Development of the Intention Concept 271

guage). These ndings are consistent with the argument that language is fundamental to the development of metarepresentational ability. We do not yet know whether childrens understanding of intention is as closely related to language ability as is their understanding of belief. We might suspect that it is not, because motivational states are more obvious in behavior and more closely tied to observable emotional expression. However, insofar as intentions, like beliefs, represent propositional attitudes to propositional contents, language ability may be similarly crucial to the development of the ability to metarepresent intention. In Lang and Perners (2002) study, cited above, language ability correlates highly with both false-belief task performance and recognition that the knee jerk is unintentional. This suggests that language development is related to the ability to metarepresent both belief and intention. In conclusion, we have argued that language is important in the development of childrens concept of intention in two distinct but related ways. First, in social, communicational interaction, children acquire semantic terms to refer explicitly to intention. Second, and more speculatively, we argued that language provides the representational format for the metarepresentation of intention, which may underlie the ability to distinguish between intention and desire. That is, the development of language may enable the shift from an understanding of intention based on the observable world to one based on the unobservable mind.

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (#5F32 HD-08594-02) to the lead author and by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the second author. We are grateful to Diego Fernandez-Duque, Ran Hassin, and Jim Uleman for helpful discussion and comments.

Note1. All of the studies described in this section employ looking-time paradigms to explore infants perceptual and cognitive abilities. Using this paradigm has a number of benets (Haith & Benson, 1998): It is well studied, there are established indices of reliability and stability, it is relatively inexpensive and easy to use, and it requires minimal participation on the part of infant subjects. However, Haith and Benson have also outlined several drawbacks to the looking-time paradigm for studying infant cognition. First, the paradigm provides only binary (yes/ no) answers to questions about infant perception (e.g., Can infants discriminate event A from event B?) and thus may not be well suited to answering more complex questions about infant cognition. Second, differential looking times reveal only that infants can discriminate between two events; they do not explain why infants look longer at one event than at another. Finally, Haith and Benson272 Intention and Theory of Mind

argue that the use of a familiarization phase in looking-time studies makes it difcult to determine whether infants come to the experiment with the ability to discriminate the test events or whether they develop this ability in the process of familiarization.

276 Intention and Theory of Mind

Theory of mind refers to the tendency to construe people in terms of their mental states and traits (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). If we see someone grimace, we might infer that he or she is disappointed, and if we see a man running toward a bus, we probably infer that he is trying to catch it. The word theory is applied to such mentalistic inferences for two reasons. First, mental states are unobservable, so their existence is merely theoretical. Second, our body of knowledge about the mind resembles a theory in several ways (Wellman, 1990). One resemblance is that knowledge about minds is causal-explanatory in nature, as are scientic theories. We explain the man running toward the bus as wanting to be on the bus and thinking it is going to pull away soon. We predict that he will be relieved if he makes it and disappointed if he does not. We also can predict that certain actions might ensue if he does not reach the bus. He may try to notify others of his late arrival by telephone, he may try to hail a taxi, or he may consult a schedule regarding the next bus. What mediates these further actions are his mental states. He will want others to know his whereabouts, he thinks that calling will accomplish that, and so on. Hence we can describe our understanding of others mental states as a theory of mind. The rst signs of appreciation of mental states appear very early in young children. For example, Baldwin (1991) found that 18-month-olds are sensitive to an adults focus of attention when learning words. In these experiments, a child was playing with a new toy, and an adult was nearby, looking into an opaque bucket at another new toy that the child could not see. The adult said, Its a toma! Look at the toma! several times. Later, the child was asked to get the toma, and was given a choice of a few toys. Children usually chose what was in the bucket (even though it had not been visible at time of naming) rather than what they themselves had been playing with. Novel277

words were thus mapped onto the object that an adult labeler was focused on, even when the child was playing with a different object. By 18 months, then, children are sensitive to adults focus of attention when learning new words. Even younger children seem cognizant about accidents, goals, and intentions. Tomasello and his colleagues found that 14- to 18-month-olds imitated adults acts when they were followed by a condent word, There! but not when they were followed by Whoops! (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998). Gergeley, Nadasdy, Csibra, and Biro (1995) and Woodward (1998) have shown sensitivity to various aspects of goals even in the rst year. In Woodwards experiments, infants were habituated to an adult repeatedly grasping one of two objects, one placed on the right and the other on the left side of a stage. For the test trial, the placement of the two objects was switched, and a new grasp was directed either at the old object in its new location or at the new object in the old location (where the hand had gone previously). In spatial terms, the latter situation was more like what had been habituated to, because the hand was moving to the same place. In intentional terms, the former was more similar, given that the hand was grasping the same object. Infants of 9 months and older recovered interest at the sight of the hand grasping the new object in the old location, suggesting they saw it as a different event. This implies that they understood something related to the actors goals in getting the object. When the same movements were made by a pole rather than a human arm and hand, infants dishabituated in the opposite manner, apparently interpreting the situation in a physical, nonintentional way. Rudimentary mentalizing abilities thus appear to begin during infancy. Theory of mind capabilities evolve throughout childhood, with simple understanding of perception and its links to knowledge emerging in the toddler years, understanding of false belief and mental representation emerging around age 4 years, and understanding of complex emotions like surprise and pride emerging somewhat later (for reviews, see Flavell & Miller, 1998; Wellman, 2002). The very early onset and predictable developmental course of theory of mind abilities has led some to suggest that they are supported by innate processes (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Bruner, 1990; Fodor, 1992; Leslie, 1994). These theorists argue that infants are too young to infer matters as complex as mental states, and they are not explicitly taught about them. Indeed, since mental states are invisible, their existence cannot be highlighted in the ostensive manner that many elements of the world are. An adult cannot point and say, That is a desire. See the desire? as they do for so many early conceptual acquisitions (Scholl & Leslie, 1999). A second source of support for theory of mind stemming from an innate process is the ease with which normal adults make theory of mind attributions, at least with reference to traits. When we278 Intention and Theory of Mind

are told someone tripped while learning a new dance step, we automatically assume that person is clumsy (Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Uleman, Newman, & Moskowitz, 1996). Although lacking empirical evidence regarding spontaneous mental state attributions, when we see a woman running to the bus as if to get on it, it seems we cannot help but see her as wanting to get on it. Indeed, we even apply folk psychology to inanimate entities like triangles (Abell, Happe, & Frith, 2000; Heider & Simmel, 1944), a clear case of extreme overattribution. In sum, the early and automatic deployment of a theory of mind has led to speculation that it stems from an innate process. This innate process could take the form of a module (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Fodor, 1992; Leslie, 1994).

ModularityA module is a specialized, encapsulated mental organ that has evolved to handle specic information types of particular relevance to the species (Elman et al., 1996, p. 36). As is apparent in this denition, which corresponds to the common usage of module in cognitive development today, modularity and innateness are often bedfellows, because modules are thought to have evolved in the species. Innateness is not a requirement of modules (KarmiloffSmith, 1992)a module could quite plausibly develop over ontogeny without being prespeciedbut discussion of modules in the cognitive development literature often assumes that modules are specied a priori by a persons DNA. The view that minds are structured a priori in a way that corresponds to the structure of knowledge can be traced to Platos dialogue Meno. When the slave boy stated various geometric principles, it was agreed that he had not been taught such ideas and that the ideas must therefore be innate. Descartes (1641/1993) later conceded to innate concepts of self and of God, from which other concepts (substance, duration, number, and so on) must be derived. Gall (1835) went further, and perhaps was the rst to postulate that specic brain regions are associated with specic functions. By measuring the thickness of neural tissue in specic parts or the brain (as indicated by bumps on the skull, which was soft when the tissue formed) he thought one might determine the strength of specic personality traits in the individual. Fodors (1983) inuential monograph The Modularity of Mind spawned the current wave of interest in modularity. Fodor describes modules as:1. 2. 3. 4. Associated with specic brain regions Showing characteristic patterns of breakdown Having a specic ontogenetic course Processing information very quicklyTheory of Mind 279

Fodors (1983) initial examples of modules are from perception and language, but Leslie (1992) and Fodor (1992) have presented arguments that theory of mind also functions as a module.The currency of our mental lives consists largely of propositional attitudes, even when we are interpreting the behaviours of others. . . . It has been suggested that this capacitytermed a theory of mind (ToM)arises from an innate, encapsulated, and domain-specic part of the cognitive architecture, in short a module. (Scholl & Leslie, 1999, p. 131)

In other words, when we think about others minds, we think about them in terms of attitudes (desire, intention, belief) toward propositions (e.g., I eat ice cream).1 Someone can want to eat ice cream, intend to eat ice cream, and think that he is eating ice cream. Leslie and Fodor, among others, claim that our capacity to make such mentalistic interpretations stems from a theory of mind module in the brain. Some of the six features of modules that Fodor described seem apt with reference to theory of mind. Theory of mind does appear to be associated with specic brain regions, namely the amygdala, basal ganglia, and parts of the temporal cortex and frontal cortex (Frith & Frith, 1999; Schulkin, 2000). The typical method in these studies is to have participants consider stories involving mental states, like deception, pretense, and false beliefs, as well as stories that do not involve mental states in any crucial way, and then to compare patterns of brain activation across the two types of story (Fletcher et al., 1995; Frith & Frith, 2000; Sabbagh & Taylor, 2000). These brain regions typically show elevated rates of activity when participants are asked to consider others mental states. There are also specic breakdowns in theory of mind, most notably in people with autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Although autism has many features, a persistent and notable one is an inability to decipher others mental states in the automatic way that most of us do. Oliver Sacks (1995) describes how Professor Temple Grandin, a high-functioning autistic woman, reacted as a child on the school playground.Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changingan exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive the manyleveled kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it. Knowing this intellectually, she does her best to compensate, bringing immense intellectual effort and280 Intention and Theory of Mind

computational power to bear on matters that others understand with unthinking ease. (p. 272)

Many experimental studies demonstrate that people with autism tend to fail tasks involving understanding mental states, at mental and verbal ages at which nonautistic individualseven those with other psychological impairments like Down syndromeeasily pass (Baron-Cohen, 2000). Theory of mind also appears to follow a specic developmental course, both within and across cultures. For example, American and Chinese children alike talk rst about desires, and about 6 months later they begin to talk about beliefs, suggesting a common developmental pattern of acquisition (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Tardif & Wellman, 2000). Children in both developed and nondeveloped countries appear to learn around age 4 that people can have false beliefs (Avis & Harris, 1991; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Regarding fast processing, the bus example given earlier suggests that people process information about others mental states rapidly and effortlessly. Experimental support for the contention that mental state information is processed quickly and automatically is lacking. There is experimental support, however, for fast processing of trait attribution. Although the theory of mind module is normally discussed with particular reference to propositional attitudes, like beliefs, desires, and pretense, theory of mind is more generally construed to include traits (Wellman, 1990). Uleman and others (reviewed in Uleman et al., 1996) have shown that when people consider anothers behavior, many appear to immediately attach to the other person a personality trait that could engender that behavior. Experimental support for the fast processing of mental states is needed. For some of Fodors (1983) criteria, then, theory of mind abilities do seem to be modulelike. Theory of mind processing appears to be associated with specic brain regions: A particular pathology is associated with its specic breakdown; it develops in regular sequence in normal children; and, at least as regards traits, there is evidence for quick and rapid processing. For other criteria of Fodors, however, module does not seem to be a tting descriptor for theory of mind. Somewhat problematic is the claim of domain specicity. Theory of mind attributions are sometimes made outside of the social domain, directed at inanimate entities (Abell et al., 2000; Heider & Simmel, 1944). One might even say of the sky, It wants to rain, or of the machine on ones desk, This computer is stupid. Either we must place triangles, weather, and computers within the social realm (which we might do), or the criterion of domain specicity is problematic. The most major concern is the claim of encapsulation. According to this assertion, mentalistic reasoning is encapsulated from other knowledge. As Scholl and Leslie (1999) wrote, The essence of architectural modularity is a set of restrictions on information ow . . . the modularized processes have noTheory of Mind 281

access to any external processing or resources (p. 133). According to Leslies (1994) descriptions, human behavior is input to the module, and mental state interpretations (He wants x; he believes x; he pretends x) are output. The theory of mind mechanism is essentially a module which spontaneously and post-perceptually attends to behaviors and infers (i.e., computes) the mental states which contributed to them (Scholl & Leslie, 1999, p. 147). We see someone running to a bus, and we automatically infer that he believes it is a departing bus, and that he wants to get on it. Whether we should see such inferences as modular (genetically dictated) or automatic (the result of repeated use, but formed by experience) is at issue. The parallels between modular processing and automaticity are notable. Bargh (1994) described the four horsemen of automaticity: efciency, lack of awareness, lack of control, and lack of intention. Modules share these same features, but the existence of the theory of mind module, according to Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995), is due to its genetic predesignation. In contrast, automatic processes are considered habits of mind, produced by repeatedly processing certain types of information in the same manner (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000).

Cultural Variation in Conceptions of Minds

A long tradition of attribution research would seem to support the view that theory of mind is modular. For example, the tendency to attribute personality traits as explanations for behavior (Jones & Davis, 1965; Ross & Nisbett, 1991) supports the notion that a theory of mind module requires people to process others behaviors in internal terms. Likewise, the tendency to spontaneously infer traits when considering others behaviors (Uleman et al., 1996) supports the idea of mandatory modular output. However, there is a great deal of other evidence against the assertion that mentalistic explanation is truly mandatory and encapsulated, as would be expected of innate modules. Anthropologists and psychologists working in different cultures around the globe have described a wealth of variation in how minds, mental states, and actions are conceived (Lillard, 1997, 1998). These differences do not necessarily indicate how the mind is spontaneously conceived, but they do beg the question of why, if our spontaneous construals all resemble European American views of the mind, there is such widespread variation in more considered (conscious) views the world over. For example, the European American concept of mind as a self-contained, thinking entity (Geertz, 1984) contrasts with the Illongot rinawa, which shares some features with mind but leaves the body during sleep, is possessed by plants (but leaves when plants are processed), and is much more an organ of social context (Rosaldo, 1980). Cultures also vary greatly in the attention282 Intention and Theory of Mind

paid to minds, with Europeans and Americans seemingly the outliers in the worlds range of cultures. We pay enormous heed to minds, as evidenced by the number of words in our languages that specify mental constructs (over 5,000 for the emotions alone), the existence of a eld of psychology, the psychological nature of books about parenting (Reviving Ophelia is about how daughters feel), and so on. The Chewong of Malaysia are reported to have only ve terms for mental processes, translated as want, want very much, know, forget, and miss or remember (Howell, 1981, 1984). Anthropologists in many cultures have commented on the people of the cultures they study claiming one cannot know others minds, refusing to speculate about others minds, preferring not to discuss others minds, and simply attaching comparatively little import to minds (LeVine, 1979; Mayer, 1982; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Paul, 1995; Poole, 1985). Even in terms of legal responsibility, in other courts of the world intention is often not what matters when determining retribution for a crime. Instead, what matters is the degree of harm caused by ones actions (Hamilton & Sanders, 1992; Paul, 1995). If a module automatically mandates outputting mental state concepts, these different degrees of attention seem odd. Whole cultures could not choose to ignore the output of vision modules or a language acquisition device because it would be impossible. There is also wide variation in what some behaviors are attributed to as well, getting more squarely at the content of modular output. If all people (except those with autism) are endowed with a brain module that perceives behavior and automatically interprets it in propositional and trait terms, we would expect to see reliance on such terms to be fairly prevalent everywhere. But again, this does not seem to be the case. In one early study demonstrating this, Miller (1984) asked Hindu Indian and Chicago children and adults to think of good and bad behaviors performed by people they knew well and, for each, to explain why the people did them. Interestingly, although by adulthood Chicagoans tended to come up with personality-trait reasons for behaviors, Indians tended to come up with situational causes. One might be concerned that this was because people in the different cultures thought of different behaviors to begin with, but in a later experiment, even when provided with behaviors (for example, a case in which an attorney left the scene of a motorcycle accident he had caused), Americans tended to give trait reasons (saying that the lawyer was a villain, for example) and Indians tended to give situational ones (the lawyer had a duty to be in court). This naive dispositionalism on the part of Americans tends to be wrongpeoples actions are strongly inuenced by the situationyet nevertheless it is how Americans tend to view behaviors (Ross & Nisbett, 1991). The Miller study is not an isolated case. We revisited this result with urban and rural American and Taiwanese children (Lillard, Skibbe, Zeljo, & Harlan, 2004), reasoning that rural American children might be different from the urban ones that are most often exTheory of Mind 283

perimental participants. Using Millers basic procedure, we found that elementary school children from rural Pennsylvania and rural Virginia tended to use situational explanations even more so than did Taiwanese children. For example, a rural 7-year-old said the reason someone had shared a bicycle with her was because she had not brought her own bike. In contrast, 7-yearolds from a more urban area tended to explain behaviors with reference to mental states and traits of the actor, like, Because she wanted to help me or Because she was nice. This pattern has held up in two different experiments drawing on different rural geographic regions. Across all groups, mental state explanations were about four times as common as trait ones. However, for rural American children, situational explanations dominated over internal ones overall. Several other demonstrations of variations from the standard American attribution pattern have been reported. Morris and Peng (1994) presented Chinese and American high school and graduate students with nonsocial (dots) and social (sh) cartoons. For both types of cartoon, a group of entities approached a single entity, stopping at the point of contact. The single entity then moved forward. Participants were asked to rate the extent to which the movement of the single entity was caused by internal factors and the extent to which it was caused by external factors. All of the American students and the Chinese graduate students (from Taiwan) tended to claim the movement was caused more by internal factors, and less by external ones, than did the Chinese high school students (from mainland China). This effect was also noted in an everyday realm: newspaper articles. Although describing the exact same Chinese and American murderers, Chinese-language papers in the United States tended to portray the murderers as a victim of their situations (He as a victim of the China Top Students Education policy; He had a bad relationship with his advisor) whereas English-language papers tended to portray the murderers in trait terms (There was always a dark side to his character). Lee, Hallahan, and Herzog (1996) have shown this same effect for sports articles in newspapers in Hong Kong and the United States. In line with their hypothesis, the effect was not seen in editorials, which they reasoned reect deeper consideration of alternative viewpoints, but was seen in newspaper articles, thought to be more spontaneous (see Uleman, 1999). Anthropologists reports concur with these experimental ndings. Lillard (1998, p. 15) reviews ethnographers reports of people designating social causes for others behaviors:If an Ifaluk person goes into a jealous rage, the person who left her or his valued possessions in plain sight of another is viewed by Ifaluk as being the cause (Lutz, 1985). In EA [European American] culture, it seems more likely that the person exhibiting the rage behavior would be seen as responsible because people are primarily in charge of their own behavior. Hamil284 Intention and Theory of Mind

ton and Sanders (1992) provide evidence for this: In assigning responsibility for unfortunate outcomes, Americans do not consider the effect of other peoples inuence as much as the Japanese do. For the American Cheyenne, behavior is seen as motivated by relationships more than by individual wills (Straus, 1977). Ones actions are generally explained by reference to someone elses actions or to ones relationship with some other (I hit him because he hit her . . . I drank with him because he is my cousin; p. 33). Straus described a social workers frustration that the Cheyenne do not take responsibility for their actions but instead make excuses. However, Straus emphasized that these are not excuses to the Cheyenne: They truly are causes. Likewise, Briggs (1970) reported that for the Utku (Northern Territories), actions are explained in terms of other peoples desires, not their own. Harre (1981) also wrote that many travelers have reported the extraordinary degree to which Eskimos seem to be inuenced by their fellows. When one weeps, they all weep.

Other cultures turn more often to ethereal causes of behavior than do mainstream Americans, claiming that their actions were caused by gods or spirits. Evans-Pritchard (1976), for example, tells of a man attributing his own tripping on a stump to witchcraft. When asked whether he shouldnt take some of the blame, since of course he had not seen the stump and was clumsy, he insisted that had witchcraft not been operative, he would have seen the stump. Americans are much more prone to assume personal responsibility. There are certainly exceptions to this, however, with the recent propensity of Americans to sue others for damages that in another time would be attributed to the suer or bad luck. These reactions might be related to Americans need for positive self-regard (if something goes wrong, it cannot be my fault; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999) and high value for control (Weisz, 1984). Another exception would be when Americans invoke the hand of God to explain some if not all events (as described in Weeks & Lupfer, 2000). In both cases, intentions are ascribed to others (the person who should have foreseen and prevented the accident, or God) but not to oneself. To summarize, in their conscious explanations of behaviors, most Americans appear to differ from many others in the world by locating explanations inside the person, in terms of theory of mind constructs like beliefs, desires, and traits. These ndings are not perfectly consistent across studies, and in some culturesthose of Taiwan and Korea in particularthe difference may not be as frequently observed or as strong (Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Krull et al., 1999; Lillard et al., 2004; Morris & Peng, 1994). Yet certainly it has been widely noted as a cultural difference in both experimental and observational work (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). If theory of mind were mandatory and encapsulated, we think we would see much less variation in these conscious interpretations. ImporTheory of Mind 285

tantly, cultural variation in behavior interpretation extends to unconscious interpretation as well, which mandatory, encapsulated modular processing does not allow for. Automatic trait processing is particularly a feature of individualistic cultures (Duff & Newman, 1997; Newman, 1993; Triandis, 1994; Zarate, Uleman, & Voils, 2001). Drawing on the well-replicated nding that people from more collectivist cultures use fewer trait constructs in person descriptions than do people from more individualistic ones, and the nding that trait thinking is particularly strong in middle childhood (Livesley & Bromley, 1973; Shantz, 1983), Newman (1991) examined spontaneous trait inferences in Anglo American suburban versus Hispanic urban fth graders. He found that only the Anglo children appeared to spontaneously make trait inferences in a word recognition test. In later work, Duff and Newman (1997) gave adult participants the idiocentrism scale developed by Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, and Lucca (1988) along with an inference task designed to reveal the extent to which participants spontaneously infer either situation or trait causes of behaviors. They found that idiocentrism was positively correlated with trait, but not with situation, cued recall (see also Newman, 1993). In a further example of this cultural difference, Zarate and colleagues (2001) examined spontaneous trait inference with adult Hispanic and Anglo American subjects. In a rst experiment, they found that Euro-American college students had signicantly shorter reaction times to trait words in lexical decision-making tasks when trait words were primed by trait-implying sentences. No such difference was seen for Hispanic participants. A second experiment found a similar effect with a trait-rating task. In sum, there is strong evidence for cultural variation in the unconscious process of spontaneous trait inference. Findings concerning cultural variation in both behavior explanations and spontaneous trait inference are at odds with a modular theory of how we interpret the behaviors of others (Lillard, 1999). If modular processing is mandatory, and if all normally functioning people have a theory of mind module that interprets behaviors, then all people should automatically infer mental states and traits in response to behaviors. Just as we cannot help, when viewing Muller-Lyer stimuli, but see one line as longer than the other, we should instinctively see behaviors as rooted in theory of mind causes (mental states and personality traits).

The Continuity of Spontaneous and Deliberate Explanations: A Study

Scholl and Leslie (1999) have taken exception to the view that variation in conscious behavior explanations is problematic for modularity theory. They286 Intention and Theory of Mind

pointed out that how one explains behavior after the fact, on an attribution task, and how one perceives behavior online, can be quite different: you cant decide not to interpret lots of situations as involving intentional agents, although you can ignore the interpretation (p. 135). (They have not responded to the spontaneous trait inference [STI] literature, but might disregard it due to its concern with traits rather than mental states, as discussed below.) According to their claim, regardless of how rural children subsequently explained the behavior, when they originally perceived the behavior, they perceived it in terms of theory of mind. Everyone who sees a man running for a train might perceive him as wanting to get to the train, although when asked why he was running, some might be more apt to say, Because he wanted to catch the train and others might be more apt to say, Because the train was leaving. This is possible, and it raises an interesting issue: How does a persons style of explaining behaviors after the fact relate to a persons online encoding of those behaviors? In other words, how does spontaneous trait inference relate to deliberate attribution? The literature suggests some divergence (Miller, Smith, & Uleman, 1981); indeed, when spontaneous trait inference works less well, it appears to be because behaviors were considered too much (Zarate et al., 2001; Zelli, Cervone, & Huesmann, 1996). Spontaneous impressions are guided by chronically accessible constructs, whereas intentional impressions are guided more by temporarily activated goal-relevant constructs and procedures, and by implicit theories (about the meanings of actions, relationships of traits to each other, etc.) (Uleman, 1999, p. 146). One way to address this issue, and Scholl and Leslies (1999) critique, is to examine the relationship between the strength of a persons tendency to make STIs (Uleman et al., 1996) and the strength of a persons tendency to explain behaviors in theory of mind terms. If automatic, unconscious theory of mind processing is modular, and after-the-fact explanations of behavior are not, there should be no consistent relationship between STI and how behavior is explained. On the other hand, if theory of mind processing is automatic, instilled through years of exposure to and practice of certain forms of inference, then the degree to which a person makes STIs and uses theory of mind constructs in conscious behavior explanation should be related. To test for the relationship between STIs and behavior explanation styles, we gave 45 undergraduate participants both types of task. Participants were recruited from University of Virginia psychology classes and were tested in groups of up to 10 persons. The STI task used a cued recall procedure, based on Tulvings encoding specicity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). The stimuli were previously used by Duff and Newman (1997, Experiment 2). Participants were shown 10 sentences, projected one at a time for 6 seconds on the wall by an overhead projector. Prior to the projection of the rst sentence, participants wereTheory of Mind 287

told that their memory for these sentences would be important later in the experiment. The rst and last sentences were ller sentences used to reduce primacy and recency effects in memory (Anderson, 1990). The 8 remaining sentences were presented in a random order, followed by two 60-second ller tasks (list as many of the U.S. states as possible, and write any thoughts you had as you were viewing the sentences). The ller tasks were intended to clear the participants short-term memory of the sentence content, and, in the case of the second ller task, to check whether participants consciously attempted to use internal or external cues to memorize sentences. Participants were asked to recall the sentences, using one of two recall sheets. Each recall sheet contained a list of eight cues, four of which were situational and cued half the sentences, and the other four of which were internal and cued the remaining sentences. An example of the sentences and associated cues is The engineer/ picks up/ the papers/ from the oor. For this, the internal cue was neat and the external cue was dropped them. Another example is The accountant/ gets the day off work/ with some fellow employees/ and takes the orphans to the circus, which had an internal cue of caring and an external cue of job obligation. The slashes in the sentences correspond to sentence parts for which recall was scored. The cues were derived through extensive pretesting at other universities. When asked to explain these sentences, in pilot work, about half of undergraduates tended to spontaneously supply a situational reason, and about half tended to spontaneously supply a trait reason. The cues used in this study were the reasons most commonly given by undergraduates during pretesting (Duff & Newman, 1997). Participants were given 6 minutes to record any parts of the sentences that they could remember and were told that if one of the cues on their sheet helped them to remember any part of a sentence, then they should record that sentence part next to the relevant cue. Participants were also told that if a sentence part was recalled with no help from the cues, then they should write it on a blank line at the bottom of the recall sheet. Following the cued recall task, three types of behavior explanation tasks were employed: forced choice, rating scale, and open-ended. Participants rst answered 16 forced-choice questions concerning other peoples behaviors. For each question, participants read a description of someone engaging in an action and were asked to choose which of two explanations was more likely. One of the two was judged to be internal, and the other external, according to a coding system developed for a prior study (Lillard et al., 2004). Internal explanations involved reasons internal to the actor: personality traits, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on. External reasons were those that lay outside the actor: the situation the actor was in, another person, a relationship, a role the person had to play, and so on. Kruglanski (1975) and Ross (1978) pointed out the difculty in making internal versus external splits, in that288 Intention and Theory of Mind

internal reasons are often embedded in external ones and vice versa. We take the point, yet believe that when a respondent chooses to emphasize the actors internal qualities versus circumstances in giving explanations, important distinctions are being made (for further discussion, see Lillard et al., 2004). Opting to explain a behavior with reference to the actor rather than the situation is a nonarbitrary choice that can reect the persons schemas and worldview. Evidence for this position would accrue if internality of behavior explanations were related to STI. The explanation choices were selected from responses given by a different group of undergraduates who participated in a pilot study. In the pilot study, 85 undergraduate participants had been given the same actions to explain, but in an open-ended format. Their most frequent responses served as choices in the present study. Examples of items on the forced-choice tasks are: The girl gave cookies to her neighbor, with the choices being The neighbor just moved in (external) or The girl wants to be kind (internal), and He hit another person in the mouth, with the choices being He disliked that person (internal) and They had an argument (external). Next, for the rating scale, participants read six sentences describing actions. Each sentence was followed by four reasonable explanations for each behavior. The sentences and the explanations were selected from responses given in the same pilot study just mentioned. Of each set of four explanations, two were internal in nature and two were external. For each explanation, participants were asked to rate how likely each explanation was on a fourpoint Likert scale, with 1 being not likely, and 4 being very likely. An example of an item from this task is Sue helped Mary with her schoolwork. Participants were asked to rate how likely it was that They are friends, and how likely it was that Sue likes to help others. Finally, for the open-ended task, participants answered two open-ended questions like those used in the prior study. They were asked to think of and explain a good behavior and a bad behavior, specically, Think of a good [bad] behavior a friend of yours engaged in during the past two weeks. What did your friend do and why did he/she do that?

Related Individual Differences

A further goal of this study was to shed light on the kinds of person variables that are associated with arriving at more external or internal reasons for behaviors. In other work, we considered several possible contributors (Lillard et al., 2004). These speculations were based on the fact that American children from less densely populated areas tended to use internal explanations for behaviors less often than did children from more urban areas. However, the rural/urban factor was confounded in these experiments with income andTheory of Mind 289

education levels of the parents. The present experiment asked participants about the rural/urban nature of their childhood communities and about income and education levels in order to examine how these factors might interplay with how behaviors are explained. In more rural communities, there are fewer people among whom to hide and perhaps a greater sense of responsibility to the group (Paul, 1995). This could lead to people in more rural communities privileging external causes of behavior. Examples include doing things because of rules or because they are the right thing to do. Yuill (1992) explained the use of fewer personality trait attributions in rural communities as being due to residents being better intuitive psychologists, because they interact more closely and frequently with the same small group of others. On the other hand, Hollos (1987) found that children in more rural communities performed much more poorly on roletaking tasks than children from urban areas, whereas performance on logical tasks, like conservation, was similar. Role-taking has been linked to theory of mind in many ways, from pretending to be other people to simulating the mental states of others to the perspective-taking studies that partially instigated theory of mind research (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Flavell, 1990; Harris, 2000; Lillard, 2002). To help us determine whether they were from more rural or urban environments, most participants lled out a brief demographic survey asking them to rate, on ve-point scales, the rural versus urban nature of their childhood community. Another factor that might be at issue with regard to behavior explanation is income level. We reasoned that the predominant income level of their community could inuence the degree to which people view themselves as victims versus controllers of circumstances. People with more money tend to have more choices in America, and people with less money are more restricted (see Lillard et al., 2004). Those who are more at the mercy of their external circumstances would tend to focus more on external causes of behavior, we reasoned, whereas those with more means would tend to see behaviors more as emanating from beliefs and desires. Similar to income, parents education level (1 being some high school and 5 being graduate degree) was also thought to be an important factor for behavior explanation because those with more education would see more possibilities and would see internal factors as leading them to choose among those possibilities. In another vein, Hollos (1987) proposed that rural children do not engage in much talking, and this could be a factor in their poor roletaking skills. Conversation could give rise to the idea that others have distinct mental perspectives that lead to their actions (Harris, 1996), and more educated parents are known to talk to children more than less educated parents. Hence, lack of conversation among rural families might also explain decreased use of theory of mind explanations.

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Finally, strength of religious conviction was also examined. Weeks and Lupfer (2000) found that more religious individuals show a stronger tendency to endorse God as a cause of events. In keeping with this, we reasoned that stronger religious convictions could be associated with a tendency to place power outside the self, in the hands of God. Commensurate with these variables was another variable that more directly assesses what several of the demographic variables were intended to get at: locus of control. Participants completed the Rotter (1966) I-E Scale and the Levenson (1981) Internality, Powerful Others and Chance Scale. Locus of control refers to whether people believe that most outcomes are the result of factors that they themselves control (an internal locus of control) or factors over which they have no control (an external locus of control) (Lefcourt, 1991). The Rotter I-E Scale is the classic measure of this construct, and was used because of its solid foundation in the literature. Levensons scale builds on Rotters and is particularly well suited to the specic issues addressed in this experiment. In particular, it addresses separately the respondents beliefs about his or her own power over events, beliefs about other peoples power over outcomes, and beliefs in chance or luck. It was expected that the income and education-level variables would actually be commensurate with locus of control and that locus of control might also relate to behavior explanation choices. In particular, people who see behaviors as stemming more from inside the actor were hypothesized to have a more internal locus of control, and those who see behaviors as stemming from situations were hypothesized to have a more external locus of control. Other research has shown that locus of control varies reliably with rural or urban background as well as with other dimensions that were confounded in our sample, namely family education background and income level (Gurin, Gurin, & Morrison, 1978; but see Witt, 1989; Zimbelman, 1987). Half the participants received the Rotter (1966) scale rst, and half received the Levenson (1981) scale rst. The Rotter I-E Scale is a forced-choice questionnaire. Participants read a series of pairs of statements, with each pair expressing divergent views about an issue, and then chose the situation that most closely corresponded to their own view. For example, one pair of statements reads, Many of the unhappy things in peoples lives are partly due to bad luck (control is placed outside the person) and Peoples misfortunes result from the mistakes they make (control is seen as being inside the person). Participants circled the statement that they agreed with more. The Levenson Internality, Powerful Others, and Chance Scale also contains statements about the causes of events. However, in this case the statements systematically address internality, powerful others, and chance, and rather than asking for agreement as a forced choice, participants are asked about their level of agreement with each statement. For example, one statement

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reads, Whether or not I get to be a leader depends mostly on my ability. Participants were asked whether they strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, agree, or strongly agree with each statement. The 24 statements constitute three different subscales and are provided in a predetermined and intermingled order on the single scale. Coding was completed as follows. For the cued recall task, each sentence was divided into four parts in accordance with criteria provided by Duff and Newman (1997) and elaborated on by Newman (personal communication, May 2000). Internal cued recall was calculated as the number of internally cued sentence parts perfectly recalled, divided by the total number of sentence parts perfectly recalled. Sentence parts were counted as internally cued when the sentence of which they were a part was cued internally on that sheet. They were counted as such even if they were not written on the same line as the cue, since recall can be cued unconsciously. Truly uncued recall could be expected to appear equally on both sheets and hence would be equivalent across the sample. Partially or imperfectly recalled sentence parts were not scored, making the scoring criteria stringent, as in Duff and Newman (1997). For the forced-choice behavior explanation task, the total number of internal explanations selected was divided by the total number of answers provided by each participant, giving a percent internal score. For the scaled behavior explanation task, responses for each category of explanation were averaged, producing a mean likelihood score for both the external and the internal explanations. For the open-ended behavior explanation questions, the total number of internal explanations was divided by the total number of explanations given, giving a percent internal score. The locus of control scales were coded in the standard manner. The subjects score on the Rotter (1966) I-E Scale is the total number of external statements that the subject endorsed, out of a total of 29 statements. On the Levenson (1981) Internality, Powerful Others and Chance Scale, subjects receive three separate scores, one for each subscale, ranging from 0 to 48 for each.

FindingsThe demographic survey revealed that the sample was fairly homogenous. This was not expected, given that the university where testing took place draws a diverse population, from rural mountainous regions to the urban areas around Washington, DC. However, in our sample, only one participant was from a very rural community (rated as 1 on the ve-point scale); most were from suburban areas (n = 17, 3 on the scale) or more urban ones (n = 10, 4 or 5 on the scale). Education levels of their parents were also high.292 Intention and Theory of Mind

Every parent had nished high school; all but 3 mothers and 1 father had some college education; and 20 fathers and 14 mothers also had postgraduate education. The mean education level was 4.2 on the ve-point scale. The income levels of their communities when growing up were rated as uppermiddle income, with a mean of 3.8 on the ve-point scale. None were rated as lower- or middle-lower in income (1 and 2 on the scale). Religiosity was normally distributed, with a majority (n = 15) declaring themselves moderately religious, 11 deeply or fairly committed, and 10 barely or not at all religious. Correlational analyses revealed that these factors were not related to any of our other measures, as might be expected from the homogeneity of the sample. The homogeneity of the sample was unexpected and made the test even more stringent, since such a sample would be expected to use a preponderance of internal explanations (based on Lillard et al., 2004). On the cued recall task, participants recalled an average of 21% of the sentence parts (6.4 of 32), comparable to results found in other research of this type (Uleman et al., 1996). The mean percentage of recalled sentence parts that were from internally cued sentences was 53 (range 0100; SD = 27), indicating that, on average, participants recalled sentence parts corresponding to internal and external cues on their recall sheets about equally. This was to be expected, given that the stimuli were preselected so that undergraduates would spontaneously infer trait and situation explanations equally. The interesting issue is how recall cued by external or internal cues corresponds with how each participant consciously explained behaviors. For the forced-choice behavior explanation questions, 51% of choices were internal (range 2588%, SD = 15), indicating that, on average, participants chose internal and external explanations equally often when those explanations were provided, but they demonstrated sufcient range for possible correlation with the spontaneous trait inference task. For the rating scale portion of the behavior explanation task, the mean rating for internal explanations was 2.99 (range 2.503.58; SD = 0.27) and the mean rating for external explanations was 3.02 (range 2.253.58; SD = 0.27), suggesting internal and external explanations were rated as about equally plausible overall. Participants found all explanations fairly likely on average when both were listed for them and they did not have to choose between them (as they had for the forced choice). Indeed, ratings on the internal and external scales were signicantly correlated (r = .38, p < .05), suggesting that the ratings reect participants individual tendencies to use more extreme versus midpoints on the scale rather than propensity to construe others actions in internal or external terms. As Solomon (1978) suggested, internal and external ratings are not necessarily inverse, and this correlation makes that point clearly. This aligns with prior work (Zarate et al., 2001; Zelli et al., 1996), and makes it less likely that one might nd correlations between spontaneous trait inference and this task.Theory of Mind 293

For the open-ended behavior explanations, the typical adult American nding was obtained. The mean percentage of internal responses was 78 (range 0100; SD = 26), demonstrating that, when the participants were asked to come up with their own explanations for behaviors, they usually postulated internal ones. The range was sufcient to allow for correlations with spontaneous trait inference. One participant used no internal explanations; one used 33% internal explanations; and 23 used 100% internal explanations, with the remaining participants between 50% and 100% internal. Cronbachs alphas were calculated for all three behavior explanation measures, and were .59, .47, and .42, for the ratings scale, forced-choice, and open-ended measures, respectively. Note that the open-ended task concerns only two items. For the other tasks, items sometimes pull for internal or external responses; hence one might not expect particularly high alphas for tasks of these sorts. Correlations between the behavior explanation and spontaneous trait inference tasks were examined next. First, there was no signicant correlation between STI and the rating scale task, as expected from the results with the rating scale, because participants tended to highly endorse both the internal and external explanation for each behavior. A signicant correlation was obtained between STI and the percentage of internal explanations for behavior for the forced choice explanation task (r = .34, p < .05). When forced to choose between an external and an internal explanation for each behavior, participants who tended to choose the internal options also tended to have spontaneously inferred traits from the brief descriptions of behaviors they read earlier in the study. There was also a signicant correlation between STI and the percentage of internal explanations participants provided on the open-ended behavior explanation task (r = .37, p = .01). Those who tended to provide more internal explanations also tended to infer traits more, as evidenced by their higher degree of trait-cued recall. These two correlations were obtained despite the fact that the sample was not very diverse. Although the range of internal explanations provided on the open-ended task was as large as possible (0100%), the majority of respondents provided mostly internal responses, averaging close to 80% internal. Had rural populations been better represented in the sample, perhaps even stronger correlations would have been obtained. Interestingly, although the behavior explanation scores were both independently related to internally cued recall, they were not correlated with each other. Whereas many (n = 23) participants were 100% internal on the openended behavior explanation task, none were 100% internal on the forcedchoice task. Indeed, only six participants chose internal choices on 75% or

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more of the forced-choice items. This makes the point that when participants are shown external options, they are apt to think them plausible, although they might not have come up with them spontaneously. Performance on the rating scale task supports this, since most participants endorsed both internal and external explanations as likely. Performance on the rating scale task was not correlated with performance on the other theory of mind tasks. The correlation pattern suggests that some participants internal orientations were revealed by their answers to the open-ended questions, and others were revealed by their choices on the forced-choice questions. The reasons for this are a topic for further research. One possibility is that participants scoring high on STI come from two camps, which might be dubbed Libertarians and Psychologists. The Libertarian camp emphasizes free choice and explains behaviors internally on the forced-choice measure. Supporting this, Miller et al. (1981, Experiment 2) obtained evidence suggesting that when American respondents choose trait options on forced-choice tasks, they are not so much claiming that the trait caused the behavior as that the behavior was freely chosen. Despite their presumed idiocentrism (suggested by their choice of trait options), Libertarians might not spontaneously use internal reasons to describe those choices. The other camp, the Psychologists, use many internal explanations on the open-ended task, score high on STI, and yet do not necessarily opt for the internal options in the forced-choice task. Such people habitually consider all manner of internal constructs, including traits and mental states, in considering what causes behaviors, but when faced with the external option in the forced-choice task, their knowledge that situations often drive behavior leads them to choose the external option often. This brings up another important renement to the results. Internal scores on the open-ended behavior explanation measure reect both trait and mental state explanations. The actual breakdown of the results is that participants gave mental state explanations about 64% of the time, and trait ones about 14% of the time. In other words, the vast majority of participants open-ended explanations refer to mental states. As is pointed out by Malle (chapter 9), prior experiments have tended to focus on traits to the exclusion of mental states (e.g., Miller, 1984). Although Heiders (1958) seminal monograph considered both mental state and trait interpretations, attribution research has focused mainly on traits. Yet our participants rarely volunteered trait explanations, as compared to mental state ones. Indeed, spontaneous trait inference related strongly to mental state explanations on the open-ended task (r = .45, p < .01) and was unrelated to trait explanations alone. The lack of relation to trait explanations could be primarily due to how few trait explanations were provided overall. Still, the relation between STI and belief-desire reasons was striking.

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One goal of this study was to provide evidence for what personality or demographic variables are associated with explaining behaviors in more internal or external terms. As stated, the demographic variables yielded no information on this, possibly because of insufcient variation. The personality variable of locus of control was tested to examine whether it might underlie avoidance of internal explanations in rural populations (Lillard et al., 2004). Scores on the locus of control scales were what one would expect for the population, given the results of other studies (Lefcourt, 1991). The mean score on the Rotter was 11.49, with a range of 5 to 19 and a standard deviation of 3.52; hence, the sample tended toward an internal locus of control. The mean on the Levenson Internal subscale was 32.96, with a range of 16 to 42, and a standard deviation of 4.98, suggesting the sample was rather internal overall. The Powerful Others subscale yielded a mean of 17.96, with a range of 3 to 35.0 and a standard deviation of 7.88. The Chance subscale yielded a mean of 21.44 with a range of 5.0 to 34.0 and a standard deviation of 6.31. Scores on the Levenson Internal subscale correlated negatively with scores on the Rotter (r = .34, p < .05), suggesting validity of these measures. Contrary to expectations, the locus of control scores did not correlate with any behavior explanation measures. It may be the case that our hypothesis is simply wrong, and that other factors, like individualism/collectivism, underlie the rural-urban ndings and propensities to regard internal or external factors as responsible for behaviors (Duff & Newman, 1997; Newman, 1993; Zarate et al., 2001). Alternatively, it may be that the college sample we tested did not have sufcient variation in locus of control to allow correlations to be revealed with this size of sample. Although signicant relations with locus of control were not seen, the relationship between spontaneously inferring traits in response to behaviors and the tendency to explain behaviors in internal terms emerged clearly. Our ndings come full circle with others in the literature. Miller (1984), Morris and Peng (1994), and others have found that people from more collectivist cultures tend to explain behaviors in more external, situationist terms than do Americans. Others (Duff & Newman, 1997; Newman, 1993; Zarate et al., 2001) have found that more individualistic participants, like Americans who score high on idiocentrism measures, are more apt to encode behaviors with traits, whereas collectivists are more likely to encode behaviors with situations. The present study demonstrates that within a single college sample, those who were more apt to explain behaviors with reference to internal factors like traits and mental states also were more apt to make STIs. This result was obtained both when participants were asked to come up with explanations for behaviors, and when they were asked to choose between two plausible explanations.

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ConclusionThe nding that how people explain behaviors, in external or internal terms, is related to how they encode behaviors, according to situations or traits, suggests rst that how one chooses to explain behavior is not an arbitrary semantic decision (Kruglanski, 1975; Ross, 1978). It relates importantly to unconscious person perception processes. Second, it suggests that theory of mind does not arise from modular processes. Automatic person inference processes were related to more considered ones. One might object that Leslies theory of mind module, as discussed earlier, has been proposed to explain our spontaneous and quick invocation of propositional attitudes to explain behavior, not traits. Leslie found behavior explanations irrelevant to the module because they were after the fact. STIs, likewise, might be irrelevant because they concern traits, not mental states. Ideally, tasks similar to the STI task could be constructed, aimed at propositional attitudes. However, it is not clear how one would do this regarding beliefs and desires. Take the bus example given previously. If participants saw a sentence reading, The man raced toward the departing bus, what would be the correct propositional-attitude cue word? Want for wants to catch? Desire? Think? How to use such cue words effectively across multiple sentences is also very problematic, since desire would presumably apply to several situations in a way that clumsy does not. Many mental states are ubiquitous; specic traits are not. The question arises, then: Do these data address the modularity account of mind reading? If a theory of mind module is strictly limited to spontaneous propositional attitude interpretations of behaviors, then it probably does not. There is no measure, to our knowledge, of spontaneous mental state inference of the unconscious sort Leslies theory appears to require. The open-ended behavior explanation is the closest we have to spontaneous explanations, and this task is done consciously. If theory of mind is limited to the propositional attitudes, we believe the onus is on modular theorists to come up with a task that assesses their spontaneous, encapsulated use. Theory of mind is generally seen as more encompassing than belief-desire reasoning and includes traits. If modular processes are thought to provide social cognitive interpretations more generally, then they should be responsible for trait attributions as well as mental state ones. As pointed out previously, automatic processes are akin to modular ones in several important ways, given that they are both fast and efcient, and their output is predictable. The essence of architectural modularity is a set of restrictions on information ow (Scholl & Leslie, 1999, p. 133). ToM interpretations . . . seem to be relatively . . . fast (they typically occur without lengthy and effortful reasoning), and mandatory (you cant decide not to interpret lots of situations

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as involving intentional agents, although you can ignore the interpretation) (p. 135). Spontaneous trait attribution in this way looks like a modular process because one sees the behavior, and one infers the trait. However, it cannot be an innately established one, given as part of our genetic endowment as has been claimed for theory of mind (Scholl & Leslie, 1999, p. 134), since it is not universal but appears to vary in culturally informed ways. The information ow is not restricted; it is open to the inuence of culture. The closest test we have, then, of a modular process for social interpretation processes is more supportive of an automatic than a modular account of that process. The correlations show that how one explains behavior after the fact (mostly with mental state interpretations, in the form of propositional attitudes) is clearly related to the tendency to infer traits spontaneously when reading about a behavior. This said, it should be noted that proponents of modular theory do not always endorse a strong version of their modules. Fodor (1983) stated, Whenever I speak of a cognitive system as modular, I . . . shall always mean to some interesting extent (p. 37) and Scholl and Leslie (1999) stated that the restrictions on information ow are always a matter of degree (p. 133). Yet once one begins loosening the criteria for what constitutes a module, one loses the very essence of a module. If a module lacks restrictions on information ow, then why call it a module? Because such soft positions leave one with nothing to evaluate, in this chapter we have addressed the strong form of innate modules. A second note is that Scholl and Leslie (1999) discussed theory of mind as having an innate basis; they were willing to concede that over development, cultural extramodular (p. 137) processes use the modular output in various ways. Yet the essential character of ToM a person develops does not seem to depend on the character of their environment at all (p. 136). We agree that the essential character of theory of mindsome concepts that map at least roughly to our concepts of belief, desire, seeing, feeling, and so onand an understanding of individuals as having some degree of agency (although the degree and circumstances under which that agency exists may differ) is universal (Lillard, 1998). But we think the evidence favors the view that these basic universal similarities in how people construe people arise from real similarities in people, rather than a module prespecifying that people are to be interpreted in these ways. And culture inuences even these basics, tipping the balance, for example, in how often we rely on mental state versus situational explanations for others behaviors. Why might there be a relationship between spontaneous trait inference and the use of mental constructs (beliefs and desires) in explaining behaviors? We see two possibilities. First is the possibility that idiocentric thought feeds both unconscious trait inference and conscious belief-desire reasoning. Uleman (1999) considered spontaneous inferences as part of the underground298 Intention and Theory of Mind

stream of unconscious thought and intentional ones as part of an aboveground aqueduct system. Taking this analogy further, both could be fed from the same source. Cultural inuences could lead both to the unconscious habits of mind that are evident in spontaneous trait inference and to the more considered, but again habitual, schematic tendency to consciously think of others behaviors as stemming from internal sources (Lillard et al., 2004; Miller, 1984). Traits occur spontaneously to people who are idiocentric, who think we act freely based on our internal proclivities rather than outside sources. Those same people, asked to reason consciously about why people do things, arrive at belief and desire explanations for those actions. A second possibility is that both belief-desire reasoning and trait reasoning are spontaneous, unconscious processes, and that belief-desire reasoning is actually primary. The spontaneous inference task only taps trait inferences, so the automaticity of belief-desire reasoning is simply untapped. Because it is primary, belief-desire reasoning emerges most readily when people explain behaviors. These spontaneous, unconscious processes are habits of mind, with individualistic or collectivist cultures providing a continual priming effect (Lillard, 1998; Shweder & Bourne, 1984) leading to peoples use of such constructs. The factors that lead to these habits of mind are primarily cultural but are also rooted in our animal biology. Infants begin life with some degree of selfawareness and understanding of others core similarity to themselves, as evidenced by infants imitation of others bodily movements in the rst hours and weeks of life (Lillard, 1999; Meltzoff & Moore, 1995). Later, as infants become aware of their own intentions, they begin to read intentions into the actions of others (Woodward, 1998). Gallese (2000) and Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) have found in monkeys what may be the neural analog of this process. When monkeys observe experimenters engaging in particular movements, some of the same neurons re in the monkeys as when the monkeys themselves make those movements. Humans have been shown to have similar processes (for a superb recent review of this topic, see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). Frith and Frith (2001) as well note that the medial frontal areas of the brain that are involved in self-monitoring also are activated in interpreting others behaviors, and several researchers have linked recent neurological evidence to theory of mind (e.g., Grezes & Decety, 2001). Although some assume that the involvement of specic brain regions suggests genetic prespecication, functional modules can arise through physical characteristics of different brain regions that come to take over types of inputs because they are more efcient at processing those inputs (Elman et al., 1996). From this process of matching themselves with others, and perceiving some of their own mental states, young children begin to understand mental processes in others. This is the root of all cultures having some theory ofTheory of Mind 299

mind, because all people really do operate in part from mental processes, and there is some awareness of these processes from early in ontogeny. However, cultures differ in how much those processes are emphasized and in how much they are acted upon (Lillard, 1998). Middle- and upper-middle-class educated Americans at the turn of the millennium seem to be at the extreme of thinking about inner life: witness large self-help sections in bookstores and how parents urge even very young children to make their own choices, based on their own desires. In contrast, in most other cultures (often termed collectivist) emphasis is on the society and tting into its mores at the expense of personal desires and other internal features of the individual. In such cultures, minds are not so emphasized, although they are still understood. The habits of mind that give rise to STIs and internalistic explanations for behaviors are nurtured in individualistic cultures, and are more akin to automatic than innate-modular processes.

Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Cara Johnson, Katie Hamm, Elizabeth Malakie, and Kimberly Patterson for their assistance with the experiment described in this chapter.

Note1. As the reader may have inferred from the context and usage, propositional attitudes are not the same thing as attitudes in social psychology. They are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, feelings) toward particular propositions (see Churchland, 1984, pp. 6366).

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PERCEIVING AND ENGAGING OTHERS

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In 1979, the sociologist Erving Goffman published Gender Advertisements, an examination of the ways in which images of men and women are used in advertisements. Goffman was particularly interested in how such images reect underlying cultural values about relations between the sexes. He went on to draw a parallel between the still photographs of advertisements and the eeting observations of strangers, gathered in the course of our lives, that comprise what he called our glimpsed world. Just as posed photographs provide insight into sociocultural values, Goffman averred, brief glimpses of others reveal a great deal about their psychological lives. In sum, Goffman suggested that observations made in passing can be used as sources of information about the internal states, social identities, and relationships of those who make up our social worlds. Several years after the publication of Gender Advertisements, Goffmans insight about the accuracy of social judgments began to receive empirical support. Psychologists have attempted to determine when and how social perceivers are correct in their judgments of others (e.g., Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992, 1993; Funder, 1987, 1995; Kenny & Albright, 1987). This work has revealed that people are often surprisingly accurate when making judgments of others based on mere glimpses. Very brief samples, or thin slices, of others behavior provide information about a wide range of psychological constructs, including mood states, dispositional characteristics, social relations, and job performance (for a review, see Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000). This accuracy derives from the fact that in many situations people are quite legible in expressing such qualities (Ambady, Hallahan, & Rosenthal, 1995). That is, in the course of everyday social interactions, people readily give off the signals that allow others to infer a great deal about them. In particular, nonverbal channels of communicationincluding facial displays,309

gestures, and tone of voiceare extremely revealing, in that they spontaneously emit clues to the true feelings and qualities of an individual. Peoples abilities to both express and interpret extremely subtle clues to internal feelings and beliefs have attracted the attention of psychologists who are interested in discovering not only what is communicated in brief social interactions but also how these communications take place. Some researchers have thus made forays into the information processing components of behavioral display, exploring the extent to which such displays are strategic or automatic (e.g., Baumeister, Hutton, & Tice, 1989; Buck, 1993; DePaulo, 1992; Pontari & Schlenker, 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an integrative review of research into the information-processing components of nonverbal displays, which we consider from the perspectives of both actors and observers. Though in the interest of clarity we discuss encoding and decoding each in turn, we adopt the integrative orientation of Pattersons (1998) parallel process model of nonverbal communication. For the purposes of this chapter, we use the convention adopted by the nonverbal communication literature and use the words encoding and decoding to denote the expression and interpretation of such cues, respectively. By bringing together work on both sides of nonverbal communication, we hope to make clear the interdependent nature of these processes, a fact that may have been obscured by empirical separation. In keeping with the spirit of this volume, our main goal is to explore how much of these two processesthe display and interpretation of nonverbal cues to emotion, beliefs, and personalitiescan be accomplished automatically. As outlined by Bargh (1994), automatic processes are characterized by unawareness, efciency, uncontrollability (i.e., they cannot be stopped), and unintentionality (i.e., they are not begun by an act of conscious will). We survey the nonverbal signals to a range of social psychological constructs, including emotional states, interpersonal expectations, social relationships, and personality traits. For each construct, we provide evidence that encoding and decoding result largely from automatic processes. We begin with a discussion of emotional communication. We focus rst on the unintentional and uncontrollable nature of such communication, highlighting the nonverbal signals of a range of feeling states. We then discuss the processes underlying the interpretation of emotional cues. As is shown, converging lines of research suggest that emotional displays are interpreted with surprising ease. In many cases, emotional stimuli need not even reach conscious awareness to elicit evaluations and behavioral reactions. We conclude this section with an examination of emotional deception, from both the actors and the observers perspective. In this case, the literature suggests that strategic attempts to convey a false emotional state are seriously hindered by the uncontrollability of nonverbal displays.

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We then consider the case of interpersonal expectancies. The communication of interpersonal expectancies serves as a potent reminder of peoples remarkable tendencies to both understand and be inuenced by the subtle, nonverbal expressions of others beliefs regarding their abilities. Because leaky nonverbal channels of communication are largely responsible for the transmission of interpersonal expectancies, the process of encoding expectancies is to a great extent uncontrollable. Research has further demonstrated that the interpretation of others expectancies also takes place even in the absence of conscious awareness. Subtle expressions of nonverbal behavior also capture the information used in making judgments relevant to social relations, and in the third section we consider how nonverbal signals are used to convey information about relationship type and quality. In many cases, people express the cues to their social relationships without conscious awareness or intention. A lack of awareness is also common when people interpret these cues, so much so that such interpretation can also be characterized as effortless. Finally, we discuss the communication of relatively stable personality attributes. It appears that displaying such characteristics through nonverbal behavior is largely an automatic process. In this last section, we also take the perceivers point of view on the communication of personality traits, discussing the results of studies indicating that the interpretation of cues to others personality traits can occur without effort, intention, or awareness. We begin with a focus on the communication of emotion.

The Automaticity of Communicating Emotion From the Actors Perspective

The need to strategically control and manage emotion is a well-known fact of social life. The need is so great that from a very young age, children acquire strategies for controlling their emotional expressions (Hochschild, 1979). For instance, at just 18 months, many infants smile only when given their mothers visual attention (Jones & Raag, 1989). Though strategically managing emotional displays is clearly a useful ability, this section focuses upon the fascinating processes by which people fail to control the expression of emotion. As is shown, emotions often spontaneously leak from the uncontrollable nonverbal channels of communication. The difculty of controlling emotion expression lies mainly in the unintentional nature of emotional displays. That is, people often do not have control over the processes that give rise to these displays because automatic mechanisms link the subjective experience of emotion to its nonverbal display (Buck,

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1984; Ekman, 1972, 1977). Though many emotional states are displayed unintentionally, the nonverbal correlates of some have been particularly well studied. Here we describe just a few of these cues. The Duchenne Smile In 1862, the French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne (1862/1990, p. 126) wrote, the emotion of frank joy is expressed on the face by the combined contraction of the zygomaticus major muscle and the orbicularis oculi. The rst obeys the will, but the second is only put in play by the sweet emotions of the soul. This form of smilingdistinguished by the combination of activity in the muscle that orbits the eye (the orbicularis oculi) as well as the muscle that pulls up the lip corners (the zygomaticus major)is commonly referred to as the Duchenne smile and it is believed to occur only during the experience of true enjoyment (Ekman, 1989). Several lines of evidence suggest that Duchenne was correct in his belief that the smile of true enjoyment is not under conscious control. First, as demonstrated by Hager and Ekman (1985), production of the true Duchenne smilewhich includes contraction of the outer strands of the eye muscle cannot be faked. Only contraction of the inner strands of this muscle can be produced voluntarily. Second, a study by Ekman, Davidson, and Friesen (1990) demonstrates that Duchenne smiles occur spontaneously during pleasant experiences. In this study, the authors obtained measures of selfreported emotional experience while participants viewed pleasant and unpleasant lms. Participants facial expressions were surreptitiously videotaped and subsequently shown to judges who coded participants smiles as Duchenne smiles or other smiles. As predicted, Duchenne smiles occurred more often while participants viewed pleasant as opposed to unpleasant lms. In addition, only Duchenne smiles occurred in combination with self-reported feelings of amusement and happiness. Thus, it appears the Duchenne smile is an example of an unintentional emotional signal, one that occurs spontaneously upon the experience of pleasure and thus provides social perceivers a reliable and valid index of a true emotional state. Blushing Negative emotions can also elicit unintentional nonverbal displays. Blushing, the spontaneous reddening or darkening of the face, ears, neck, and upper chest, is accompanied by the subjective experience of embarrassment, self-consciousness, and conspicuousness. It is believed to result from unwanted social attention, be it positive or negative (Leary & Meadows, 1991). One intriguing explanation for blushing is that it represents an automatic response to the mere presence of staring eyes. Templeton and Leary (1991) tested this explanation by having participants sit on one side of a covered two-way mirror with temperature sensors attached to their cheeks. The experimenter then uncovered the mirror to reveal an audience of several people312 Perceiving and Engaging Others

on the other side of the mirror. For half of the participants, the audience members wore dark glasses that concealed their eyes, while for the other half the audiences eyes were uncovered. In support of the staring eyes explanation, facial temperature was found to depend on the presence of audience members glasses. When audience members eyes were left uncovered, participants blushed more. These results suggest that the elevation in facial temperature that is characteristic of blushing stems, in part, from an automatic response to others staring eyes. In this sense, blushing is clearly an unintentional process, one that is elicited by the mere presence of a stimulus in the environment. Tone of Voice Generally considered the most leaky channel of communication, tone of voice reveals a true internal state that a speakers words can otherwise disguise (Ekman & Friesen, 1969; DePaulo, 1992). Even very brief samples of the tone of voice are revealing about several attributes, including age and gender (Helfrich, 1979), socioeconomic status (Ellis, 1967), extroversion-introversion (Siegman & Pope, 1965), dominance (Mehrabian & Williams, 1969), and competence (Parsons & Liden, 1984). Vocal cues also provide information about a speakers emotional state, conveying cues to depression (Pope, Blass, Siegman, & Raher, 1970), anger (Scherer, 1981), and nervousness or anxiety (Harrigan, Harrigan, Sale, & Rosenthal, 1996). In a study examining the types of cues emitted by the tone of voice, Ambady, Hogan, and Rosenthal (2002) investigated the relationship between vocal cues of interpersonal variables and performance evaluations of a sample of business executives. Judges rated brief clips taken from audiotaped interviews of the sample on a number of dimensions. These ratings were then compared with the samples actual performance evaluations. Business executives who were rated as outstanding by their supervisors were also rated by the judges as higher on interpersonal attributes such as warmth and enthusiasm. It seems plausible that, without consciously realizing it, these executives were revealing in their voice some very important information about how well they performed their jobs. A persons level of anxiety, as spontaneously revealed through the tone of voice, is a particularly easily recognized cue that often has important interpersonal implications beyond what a speaker may intend. For instance, one study revealed that anxiety in physicians voices was positively correlated with the success of their referrals, indicating that anxiety and nervousness in the doctors voice may be perceived by the patient as concern (Milmoe, Rosenthal, Blane, Chafetz, & Wolf, 1967). Duchenne smiles, the act of blushing, and tone of voice are just a few examples of nonverbal cues that provide a true window into another persons feelings. Each demonstrates that the nonverbal signals of internal states are often displayed instantaneously, unintentionally, and uncontrollably.The Glimpsed World 313

Why is it so difcult to strategically manage emotional displays? The answer may lie in our genetic makeup. Anthropological evidence suggests that our evolutionary ancestors needed a mechanism for quickly and easily communicating the emotions they experienced, as such communication conferred survival value in a number of ways. For instance, the display of fearthe raising and pulling together of the eyebrowssignaled submission and thus helped the actor avoid the aggression of those more powerful. Involuntary displays of emotionsuch as those that signal both anger and fearare also the manifestations of reexlike physiological processes that guide adaptive behavior (Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Etcoff, 1986). Now, modern-day humans as well as our closest evolutionary relatives are equipped with automatic links between the experience and display of emotion (Buck, 1984; Ekman, 1972, 1977). These links are most likely responsible for the unintentional nature of the nonverbal hallmarks of emotion.

From the Perceivers Perspective

Fortunately for the busy social perceiver, just as the expression of some emotions is governed by hardwired automatic mechanisms, the interpretation of emotion appears to be similarly preprogrammed (e.g., Dimberg, 1997). In this section, we discuss how the recognition of emotional states, a fundamental social skill, can take place without conscious awareness. In 1980, Zajonc advanced the notion that emotion recognition can take place even in the absence of awareness. This notion has received some experimental attention at both the behavioral and neurophysiological levels. For instance, one study examined the patterning of facial muscle movements that are elicited upon the nonconscious perception of emotional stimuli (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000). Previous work had demonstrated a tendency on the part of social perceivers to spontaneously mimic the nonverbal emotional displays of others. Dimberg et al. tested the hypothesis that behavioral mimicry would take place even in the absence of conscious awareness. Participants in this study were subliminally exposed to happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions, and facial electromyographic (EMG) recordings were simultaneously obtained. EMG recordings revealed that despite the fact that they were not consciously aware of the emotional stimuli, participants reacted with facial muscle congurations that mimicked the subliminally presented faces. Further evidence for the automatic nature of emotion recognition comes from brain imaging studies. Many studies have supported the notion that the amygdala is central to the brains processing of emotional stimuli and is particularly responsive to the sight of fearful faces (for a review, see Whalen, 1998). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Whalen and his colleagues (1998) sought to determine the role of conscious awareness in the314 Perceiving and Engaging Others

amygdalas response to emotional stimuli. In this study, pictures of human faces bearing fearful or happy expressions were presented to participants using a backward-masking technique that rendered participants unaware of having seen the expressions. Although participants reported not seeing the expressions, amygdala activity was signicantly greater during the presentation of fearful faces than during the presentation of happy faces. At the level of regional brain activation, therefore, people demonstrate a reaction to emotional stimuli even when the stimuli fail to reach conscious awareness. These studies suggest that evaluations and behavioral reactions to emotional stimuli occur even in the absence of conscious awareness, one of the dening characteristics of automatic processes. By doing so, they have made a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms underlying emotion recognition.

Emotion Deception From the Deceivers Perspective

What happens when people strategically attempt to deceive others about their true feelings or beliefs? It seems reasonable to suggest that because nonverbal displays are generally conveyed in an unintentional and uncontrollable manner, people will be at a disadvantage when attempting to strategically manipulate their display. Indeed, a long line of research on the psychology of deception has suggested that several characteristics of nonverbal behavior contribute to the difculty of successful deception. It appears that even the most skilled liars are often betrayed by uncontrollable nonverbal cues to their true feelings and beliefs. This uncontrollability arises, in part, from the fact that people are often not consciously aware of the display of some nonverbal behaviors. It also appears that when people are highly motivated to lie, the increased attention they pay to the control of their nonverbal behavior often has the paradoxical effect of generating increased skepticism about their veracity. As discussed above, nonverbal behaviors often reveal information about a speakers true feelings or beliefs, a phenomenon referred to as leakage (Ekman & Friesen, 1969, 1974; Rosenthal & DePaulo, 1979a, 1979b). Leakage cues are present despite peoples conscious attempts to control their behavior in order to mislead others. Rosenthal and his colleagues have shown that the tone of voice is often the most revealing channel in terms of deception, followed by the body and the face (Rosenthal & DePaulo, 1979a, 1979b; Scherer, Feldstein, Bond, & Rosenthal, 1985). For example, if deceivers are seeking to disguise fear or anger, they may speak more quickly and their voices might sound higher and louder. Paul Ekman (1985) discovered the unintended nature of emotional communication while conducting studies with nursing students who were highlyThe Glimpsed World 315

motivated to hide their negative reactions to lms of gory medical scenes. He found that even those students who were adept at deception unwittingly communicated their actual emotional reactions to the lms through their voices and bodies. Specically, vocal pitch increased when the students attempted to pretend that they were watching a pleasant lm when, in fact, they were watching a lm featuring scenes of amputations and burns. Bodily gestures were even more informative than vocal cues as to the nurses true reactions to the lms. This has been attributed to the fact that people are less aware of the bodys vulnerability to leakage than they are of the potential for faces to reveal their true feelings. Feldman and White (1980) advanced an intriguing theory to explain the leakage of cues to deception through bodily channels of communication. According to this theory, the arousal that deceivers feel in the midst of a lie might be successfully kept from the face, but it will be shunted to another channel of communication, such as the body. In effect, the arousal does not just disappear but manifests itself in other, leakier channels. DePaulo, Lanier, and Davis (1983) found that nonverbal behavior was particularly revealing when people were highly motivated to lie about their attitudes and opinions. It seems that the motivation to appear honest generates anxiety, which is manifested in the display of higher vocal pitch and fewer head movements. These behaviors are often interpreted as insincerity (Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981). Highly motivated liars may also adopt several different strategies to convey honesty, including attempting to deliberately control all verbal and nonverbal behaviors. This, too, has the paradoxical effect of arousing suspicion, as it leads to less movement and more behavioral rigidity (Zuckerman et al., 1981). In sum, the literature on the psychology of deception suggests that the expression of an individuals true feelings or beliefs is often not under conscious control. Even high motivation to deceive successfully cannot override the inuence of instinctual and automatic behavior. Indeed, high motivation often has the paradoxical effect of alerting others to a lie.

Deception From the Lie-Detectors Perspective

Peoples ability to detect deception in others is only a little better than chance, as the rate of successful lie detection has been found to be approximately 60% (Zuckerman et al., 1981). One might speculate that if people were to apply all of their cognitive efforts toward accurate lie detection, their chances for success might improve. However, we suggest that this is not the case, because successful lie detection is in large part a process that naturally proceeds without our awareness. As with other types of judgments (Gilbert & Krull, 1988;

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Wilson, Hodges, & LaFleur, 1995; Wilson & Schooler, 1991), increased attention may paradoxically diminish accuracy. If lie detection can be characterized as a process whose inner workings are largely inaccessible to conscious awareness, then we can make several other hypotheses about the effects of situational constraints on its success. First, formal training should do little to improve detection accuracy. Such training may disrupt the normal ways in which we process deception cues, forcing people to rely on consciously mediated strategies when, in fact, nonconscious processing is optimal. Second, if people process cues without awareness when attempting to spot a lie, they should be unable to articulate the strategies they use in lie detection; this is, they should have no conscious awareness of the strategies they use when engaged in such processing. Therefore it also follows that there should be little to no correlation between lie detection success and condence in lie detection. A great deal of work has investigated the success of lie detection under these conditions. The ndings are consistent with the notion that lie detection is, for the most part, a nonconscious process. In support of the rst assumption, most research suggests that there are limitations and sometimes even adverse effects of formal training in lie detection. For example, Kassin and Fong (1999) found that formal training makes little difference when differentiating between true and false denials in a criminal interrogation. In fact, those who underwent training were less accurate than naive controls, though they were more condent and cited more reasons for their judgments. When left to their own devices, however, people tend to use automatic, overlearned strategies to detect untruthful statements. They are thus in large part unaware of their lie detection strategies. For this reason, lie detectors are generally unable to articulate what combination of verbal and nonverbal cues they use (Zuckerman et al., 1981). Even lie detection experts like police ofcers, detectives, and prison guards have been found to possess incorrect beliefs about indicators of deception (Vrij, 1993; Vrij & Semin, 1996). In addition, there seems to be no relationship between condence in lie detection ability and actual accuracy. DePaulo, Charlton, Cooper, Lindsay, and Muhlenbruck (1997) conducted a meta-analysis investigating this relationship and found that the accuracycondence correlation in the detection of deception was r = .04. In fact, condence was positively correlated with the tendency to erroneously judge messages as truthful. Thus, not only are people largely unaware of their true lie detection abilities, but those who are more condent also show more false negative errors (i.e., failures to detect lying). In sum, existing evidence suggests that the strategies used to detect deception are generally employed outside conscious awareness. Because lie detection naturally occurs in a relatively automatic fashion, attempting to exert

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conscious control over lie detection often results in diminished accuracy. These ndings have important implications for the training of those whose jobs require accurate lie detection.

The Automaticity of Communicating Expectancies

In the previous section, we discussed how the display of emotional states can take place without intent and control, and how the interpretation of these displays can occur without conscious awareness. This is often fortunate for the busy social perceiver, who is faced with surveying an almost overwhelming amount of information at any point in time. However, the automatic communication of internal states and beliefs can often have serious and negative interpersonal consequences for the social perceiver. This is perhaps best revealed through the pervasive presence of interpersonal expectancy effects in many settings. The work of Rosenthal and his colleagues, in particular, has revealed that privately held expectations about others actions and abilities are often spontaneously communicated. The communication of such expectancies, even when the bases for them are false, often results in self-fullling prophecies (e.g., Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Rosenthals rst studies revealed the tendency of participants in behavioral research to conrm the experimenters expectations about the outcome of the study. These ndings were traced to the unwitting communication of such expectancies on the part of the experimenter. Attention later turned to the communication of expectancies in real-world interactions with enormous practical importance, including those between teacher and student (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968), doctor and patient (e.g, Caporael, Lukaszewski, & Culbertson, 1983), and judge and jury (Blanck, 1993).

From the Actors Perspective

How are these expectancies conveyed? A substantial body of work has addressed this question. One clear conclusion to be drawn from this work is that the expression of expectations is rather uncontrollable. To a great extent, this is because interpersonal expectations are communicated via leaky nonverbal channels of communication (Harris & Rosenthal, 1985; Rosenthal & Fode, 1963). In the domain of teacher-student relationships, explorations of leakage hierarchies have begun to reveal the patterns of nonverbal behavior associated with expectancy comm